


One Engine

by testyTypist



Category: Fear Mythos - Fandom, Slender Man Mythos
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Hospitalization, Implied Sexual Content, Supernatural Elements, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-05-16
Packaged: 2017-12-08 03:53:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 30,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/testyTypist/pseuds/testyTypist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After months of physical therapy and learning to get back on her feet, Dalia Leer thought that the worst was almost over. Except even Dalia doesn't quite know who she is anymore, and the struggle to get back into the swing of a life she's mostly lost is more than she thinks she can handle.</p><p>Recovering from her accident should be the most important thing on her mind, but there's something else that has her worried. There are monsters in the woods and monsters in the mirror. And Dalia begins to suspect that there may very well be monsters in her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hospital

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beginning of Act One: The Heroine, Arisen

In the mornings, Sally would come in to stretch her legs and help her stretch her back. After weeks of inactivity, her muscles had been reduced to jell-o. Nurse Sally spent a lot of time in the weeks after, helping her move her limbs and helping her stand and walk to the physical therapist.

Sally and Dr. Pond also helped her work her brain. It scared her how child-like she had been when she had awoken from her coma. They had helped her start talking in sentences again and had reminded her about things that should have been automatic. They had gotten her almost back to normal.

“You look like you’re getting better,” Sally told Dalia brightly, when she entered the small hospital room a month into her recovery. “Lucky girl. There’s something going around.”

Dalia didn’t respond. She was still only half-awake.

Sally darted around the room, opening shades and fluffing her pillow up.

The doctors and one nurse were the only three staffers she ever saw on this floor. There were other doctors she heard about and heard moving around the hospital, but these were the three who ever walked into her room.

“What’s going around?” Dalia asked weakly, in her scratchy morning voice.

Sally shrugged. “Oh, you know. Probably the flu. It’s that time of year.”

Dalia was actually unsure what time of year it was. She would take the nurse’s word for it.

She had to take a doctor or a nurse’s word for a lot of things lately. She knew her name and she knew that she was alive. She knew she had been in a car accident in which she had sustained head trauma (obviously), deep bruising, and a few compressed vertebral fractures.

The brain injury was the main concern. Her brain was being exercised daily and she was subjected to a barrage of tests and scans.

She was told she was making such progress, but she still felt so small and helpless.

No family came to claim her during her stay. She couldn’t picture who they would be, and not one showed up to remind her.

Dalia had had one visitor during her stay, and that was Josh. Whoever he was, he had watched over her in her coma and he was still around now.

For the life of her she couldn’t remember him, but he must have been important. He was there, wasn’t he? And he acted like someone who knew her well.

“I knew you’d be back on your feet soon,” he’d told her. “Every time I started to think you wouldn’t wake up, I was sure you’d get up from your coma and slug me.”

Those words stuck with her. They painted for her an image of a woman she might have been once. Sometimes she repeated them like some mantra at night, just to hear her voice and short-term memory in motion.

Sally was frowning on her when she came back to the present.

“You in there, Dalia?” she asked. She sounded so kind and concerned. Maybe like a mother, but Dalia couldn’t draw to mind any image of a mother.

“I think so,” Dalia admitted wanly.

“Josh should be here any time,” Sally announced. “He said something about taking another walk with you today. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Dalia felt a surge of rage. Was she a dog? Oh, what luck, Dalia! Master might take you for a walk today!

That last thought felt oddly familiar once she thought it. It unsettled her and she pushed it away.

“Yeah, maybe,” she agreed.

“He’s a nice boy,” Sally said.

He and Dalia were both about thirty. She’d hardly call him a boy. “Yes, he is.”

“You’re lucky to have a friend like him.”

For some reason, she had trouble seeing him as a friend. He acted like she was his friend, but she never felt it. He was kind, but he was not a friend. She could not shake the feeling that he was not her friend. He was not an equal.

Dalia climbed out of bed when Sally left and changed into a pair of jeans and a black hoodie. Josh, who apparently knew where she lived and had a key to her apartment, brought her some of her clothes. Most of her shirts were black and heavy. Josh had laughed when she asked why and told her that it was easier to disappear in black.

Her body always felt heavy when she stood each morning. Her legs were sticks and her lifted arms suddenly felt thirty pounds heavier than they were. Her back didn’t hurt her as much as it had when she had first woken up, but it still felt stiff and sore. She was still constantly reminded that she was not well.

She was gaining muscle back from her exercises. Her reflexes were getting better. Her concentration was almost back to normal, as was her short-term memory. Still, she didn’t want to get out of bed in the mornings.

Josh came by a little after she had eaten breakfast.

“You look like you’re putting some weight back on finally,” he told her cheerily. “How are you feeling?”

Some mornings, when she saw him, she wanted to smack that smile off of his face. She had so much to do and here he was, wasting her time with all of his good-natured filler.

There was always the feeling that she was right in the middle of doing something important and she was being interrupted, but she had no idea what was so important about her daily activities that she felt intruded upon constantly. She could be eating jell-o and she would feel like she was executing some intricate maneuver and some oaf had walked right through it.

“I feel like I was hit by a car and now I’m stuck eating hospital eggs,” she told him.

This didn’t cause Josh’s smile to fade at all. He still seemed just as happy to see her as he had before. “You’re getting better though. You’ll be up and out of here in no time. You’ll remember everything soon.”

Remembering was too good a thought to be true. The Dalia that had woken up was living inside some bitter, fractured person whose feelings never seemed to make sense to her. She was starting to think that she would always be this. She didn’t have the kind of faith in her that Josh did.

Before either of them could say anything else, Dr. Pond came wandering in, studying his clipboard intently.

Pond was nothing like Dr. Niterus. Pond was a younger man who seemed to have less patience than Niterus. He always looked a little annoyed with his patients, just for being there.

“Do you live here now, Sucher?” Pond asked Josh when he walked in to find him in the room. “Every day, you’re right here. It’s like I got two patients for the price of one with Ms. Leer.”

“I’m keeping an eye on her, Doctor.” If he noticed Pond’s moods, he never let on. He acted like Pond was talking to him like anyone else did. “I can’t just leave her now.”

Josh’s sense of duty would not allow him to be moved from Dalia’s side for too long. He had failed many things in his life, but this was one thing he would do well. When she was back to normal and they could go on with their lives again, he would be praised for his devotion and his steadfast attention to his downed partner. He was sure of this.

Pond ignored him and began checking Dalia’s heartbeat and blood pressure. He looked into her eyes and checked her reflexes. His bedside manner left something to be desired. He seemed to have the impression that Dalia was a rag doll and her limbs could be tossed around. It annoyed her, but she never said anything. She didn’t know much about herself, but she knew she was not someone who whined and complained that they couldn’t take something.

When she was cleared for the morning by Pond’s callous examination, she and Josh began their walk around the hospital.

She noticed for the first time that Sally was right. She noticed that plenty of the patients in the rooms she passed looked worse than they had the last time she had made the rounds with Josh. Maybe flu was going around. She hoped she didn’t get it. That was the last thing she needed.

“You should be getting out of here soon,” Josh announced brightly. “It’s gonna be nice to get settled back in at your place, I bet. You excited?”

Dalia wondered sometimes if he was a complete idiot. “Am I excited to go back to a place I don’t remember being? Yeah. I’m fucking thrilled.”

“You’ll remember once you get home,” Josh assured her. “Once you see your place, you’ll remember it.”

“Maybe,” Dalia relented. That was as hopeful as she could get.

Josh was sure of this though. He had been sitting around her apartment that morning, trying to figure out if he needed to bring her anything else, and he had been sure that she would recognize her home when she got to it. It looked just like her. It was simple and neat. It was sparsely-lit. Her closet was full of work materials that she would recognize. Her bookshelf was full of poems she pored over and could recite by heart at the drop of a hat.

On her wall was a pressed, framed leaf. It was black and slick-looking and the veins were a deep red. Dalia herself had framed it with care and hung it on her wall above the bookshelf. Surely, she would be struck with realization when she set eyes on her most prized possession. Her eyes would widen and it would all dawn on her. She would wonder how she had been stupid enough to ever forget.

He didn’t tell her any of this. She needed to figure it out on her own. He worried about what it would do to her mental state if she relearned too much too fast. She had lost too much that had taken her years to get used to the first time. He had to treat softly now.

“How good of friends were we?” Dalia asked him. She had thought about it a few times, but it just came out now.

Josh wasn’t nearly as taken aback by the question as she had expected. She had to wonder if maybe they weren’t as close as he had made it seem initially, since he was used to this blunt and insensitive line of questioning.

“We used to be closer,” Josh admitted. “Life kinda got in the way, but we got along pretty well once.”

That was close enough to the truth. Life had gotten in the way more than he could explain. There wasn’t much of a connection anymore. If they didn’t work together, he doubted Dalia would have spoken to him anymore. Before her accident, he didn’t think that they would have continued their relationship very long.

This might have been the best thing that had happened between them, because things could have gotten ugly soon without intervention.

Still, he was sad that that intervention had come in the form of a near-fatal accident. He never wanted her to get hurt. Even though she wouldn’t say the same about him if she remembered.

“So, why are you the one who showed up to help me?” That was another thing that had been bothering her.

“No one else would have.” It sounded harsh, but it was the truth. “You don’t really talk to anyone else. You keep to yourself. Your favorite thing to do is read poems by yourself.”

That sounded wonderful to her. It felt like the truth. It felt familiar. The thought was one she took some genuine pleasure in. “I was wondering why being in a building full of people was bothering me.”

Josh nodded. “We only started talking because we were working together so much.”

Dalia didn’t ask where they worked. She had tried that before and he had simply said that they did odd jobs together. He said it would be better if she remembered on her own, but she didn’t like the sound of that.

“What do you think of the doctors here?” Josh wanted to know.

She felt like this was a way to change the subject, but she went along with it. “I’ve only met two doctors and the one nurse. Pond’s an ass, Niterus looks like he needs to be in a hospital, and Sally is so happy it makes me want to scream.”

Josh liked the sound of this. She sounded just like herself. Sometimes it was easy to forget that she wasn’t the same as she had been before that night.

“Niterus is a great doctor,” Josh insisted. “One of the best. Brilliant.”

Dalia’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know him? Has one of us had to go to him before?”

Josh thought carefully about his next words before he opened his mouth at all. “We know him. He was an old friend, kind of. You never got that close to him. You never get that close to anyone.”

That should have sounded sad, but she still liked the thought of herself as a loner. It was validation of her feelings that she was a loner.

“So, we work together doing nondescript odd jobs?” She wanted to make sure she had this one right. “And we have a friend who’s an old doctor?”

“Yes.”

“This all sounds really odd,” she said after she had some time to think it over again. “You realize that, right? You get how odd that sounds?”

“Yes.”

Dalia sighed. “I don’t know anymore. I’m not sure if I even wanna know anymore.”

“You do!” Josh didn’t want to sound upset, but she needed to remember. There was no third option. From where he stood, there were no options at all. “Don’t you wanna get back to your life? Or do you wanna spend the rest of your life having to ask other people about yourself?”

The thought disturbed her. The last thing she wanted was to feel this helpless forever. She knew she did want to get back to normal – even if her normal was abnormal to others – but she was beginning to worry about what she would find when she unearthed the last secrets in her mind. It scared her, what might be there. The thought would have kept her awake if she didn’t pass out at around ten every night from the lethargy and quiet of the neurology ward.

“Why can’t I go home now?” Dalia demanded. “I think I’m about as good as I’m gonna get.”

“You’re close.”

“I’m ready,” she argued. “I wanna go home and see my apartment and get back to whatever stupid job we have together. I’m wasting time I’ll never get back, sitting around in a hospital with a bunch of other sick and crazy people.”

Josh smirked. “See, I know you’re gonna be fine soon. You sound like the old Dalia all the time lately. You’re so close.”

If that was true, then maybe she was at least an interesting person. At least maybe she was witty and tough. Both good things, she supposed. Better than frail and lost, like she was now.

It was on a positive note that she and Josh parted ways.

. . . . .

“She wants to leave,” Josh told Dr. Niterus, who already knew. “She’s getting restless.”

Niterus was busy in his little lab, in an alcove away from the offices and the patients. He was putting together a potent mix. “I can release her at any time now. Physically, she’s fine to go home. But I don’t think you want her to go. If she was thinking clearly, she wouldn’t want to go either.”

Logically, of course he was right. Josh couldn’t guess how much longer logic would keep Dalia waiting in a hospital though. “Is she really in danger if she leaves?”

Niterus laughed at him, and it was a dry and mocking sound. “Is she really in danger? Is that what you’re asking me, you stupid boy?”

Josh didn’t reply. He could only make himself look more stupid if he made an attempt to redeem himself now.

“As soon as she leaves my care, she’ll be in danger.” He explained slowly, like he was talking to a child. “I’m doing what I can. You have to help me though. You have to help in convincing her to stay too. She thinks she has to hurry her recovery. There’s nothing wrong with her waiting here until she starts to remember.”

Josh felt guilty for plotting against her, but it was for her own good. It was to help her. He knew that nothing good would happen if they stepped outside the protection of the hospital, but he was just now realizing that even Dr. Niterus thought this was more serious than they had first suspected.

“What are you making?” Josh finally gathered up the courage to back his curiosity.

Niterus looked up from the vial with a twinkle in his black eyes. He gazed out over the sharpness of his beak. “Why do you think she can sleep with everything on her mind?”

Josh’s stomach dropped. “You’re drugging her?”

“I’m a doctor,” Niterus reminded him. “I drug a lot of people.”

“You’re drugging her so she’ll sleep though? Why?”

Once again, Niterus found himself disgusted by Josh’s ignorance. It was almost offensive. “The more time she spends in dreams, the closer she is to him. Your master dwells in the dark corners. There is no place as dark and secluded as the part of the human mind where dreams live.”

Josh had to admit that it was an ingenious thought. Still, he didn’t love the idea. “But what if she’s not ready for this? What if it drives her crazy?”

“All the better,” Niterus smiled. “Your master dwells in madness too. Either way, she’ll find him if we keep this up.”

“Hopefully.”

Niterus poured the concoction into the small water bottle that he always had sent in to her with dinner. It would take a few hours to take effect, but it was deadly efficient once it did. In a few hours’ time, she would be out.

She wouldn’t taste it. It didn’t taste like anything at all. She would miss it like she always did.

“I hope this works,” Josh admitted. “I just wish there was a better way.”

Niterus’ hand moved before Josh even saw it, and the back of his hand crashed into Josh’s face before he could move. It sent him back a few steps and was a shock he hadn’t been prepared for. “You think too much, Sucher. The ways of your superiors are the better ways. If we wanted your opinion, we would have asked for it.”

Josh didn’t argue. Niterus was right. Josh nodded and took a few more steps back with his head bowed. He moved from the doorway to allow Niterus to pass.


	2. Doctor, Doctor

Dr. Niterus was a pale and sickly-looking man. He walked with a slight limp and a hunch to his back. He was more pleasant than Dr. Pond though, so Dalia didn’t mind him as much.

He brought dinner in to her, instead of sending it with Sally.

“You’re looking well, Ms. Leer,” he told her. “Another few weeks and you could be out of here.”

“I want out sooner than that,” Dalia said. “I’m not a fan of hospitals.”

“No one is.” He sounded just as understanding as ever. “You’re lucky to be here though. You came close to dying.”

“Do you have newspapers or anything from my accident?” She’d meant to ask someone, but she kept forgetting. She’s meant to look it up herself, but she hadn’t had access to a computer. “It’s been over a month and no one can tell me very much about it.”

She imagined sometimes that she remembered it, but they weren’t real memories. She tried hard to picture a car accident and tried to imagine herself in one, but she couldn’t conjure up a scene that was honestly familiar.

Josh had apparently been there, but he didn’t ever talk about it. He insisted he didn’t know what happened, but she knew he was lying.

Niterus smiled. He had a kind smile. It should have been comforting but it never served to comfort her. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have one.”

“You don’t know anything about it at all?” She was less optimistic now.

Niterus shook his head. “This hospital is my life, dear. I hardly notice what happens outside of it.”

That didn’t surprise Dalia at all. He didn’t look like he had stepped out of the hospital in years.

“Sally says there’s a flu going around,” Dalia told the doctor, like he didn’t already know. “Should I be worried? I’m not gonna have to worry about being bedridden anytime soon, am I?”

“There’s no flu,” Niterus informed her solemnly. “It’s a little nastier than that. We’re still doing tests, but we’ll know what it is and have it taken care of in no time.”

That was just what she needed: an epidemic of who-knows-what. “So I should be worried?”

“No,” Niterus assured her. “We’ve taken precautions. You’ll be fine.”

She wasn’t sure how he could make a promise like that, but he scurried out before she could argue much. He left her with her late dinner. She was used to it by now. It usually came with Sally, but she didn’t mind a visit from someone less painfully cheerful.

Meals at the hospital depressed her. Hospital food was unmistakable. It reminded her, without fail, that she was in a hospital and that she might be in a hospital for a very long time. Niterus had said that he wanted to keep her a few more weeks, but that sounded unbearable.

She tried to pace the halls for a while but, after a few hours, she was exhausted.

She crawled into bed in her underwear and the black hoodie and fell into the same deep sleep that she had been lucky to fall into every night lately.

The only problem with sleeping the sleep of the dead was the nightmares.

Her dreams never made sense, but they still unsettled her. They were collections of images that she couldn’t piece together. It was all nonsense. The fingers of mammoth trees extending to the pink sky. Wet leaves sticking to her feet; wet leaves filling her mouth. Blood dried onto her skin (at least she thought it was hers). Ashes. Mud. Josh, pouting out in a car. Gloved hands closing glassy eyes. Scrapped metal, curling and smoking.

She always woke up with her heart beating too fast, and she sometimes thought she caught a glimpse of dark silhouettes in the corners of her room. She would open her eyes and see what reminded her of a large bird, watching her from the corner. Beady black eyes and a beak. A long black shape that may or may not have been wrapped in black wings. She never looked twice at it though. She shut her eyes again and tried to really wake up this time.

She wondered if any of the images were from her life. The burning metal had to have been from her accident. Maybe that was where the blood was from too. The forest could have been a childhood memory, maybe. She didn’t have a good grasp on childhood memories, but she knew she had to have some, hidden somewhere in the back of her mind. So maybe there was a forest she spent time in as a child.

How strange, to think of herself as a child. Still, it had happened.

Or maybe all of it was just fragments that weren’t meant to fit together. Maybe it was all just pieces of images she had picked up throughout her life and her mind was taunting her with the possibility of answers.

She had grown accustomed to wanton cruelty from her brain.

Each morning was just as cruel, because she remembered where she was every time she opened her eyes.

Dr. Niterus managed to keep Dalia in the hospital for the next three weeks. He insisted that there were a few things they still had to test for. He assured her that he knew what was best for her, and she wasn't healthy enough to leave yet. She believed him, up to a point, but she was growing more and more restless and she was determined that she would be home soon.

. . . . .

The hospital made her more nervous every day. The "flu" Sally had casually mentioned had actually turned out to be viral pneumonia. It was sweeping through the floors beneath her. It had taken hold in the wards where immune systems were weak, and they couldn't seem to contain it. Six people were dead and at least ten were still sick. The number grew every day. It was only a matter of time before the virus moved up to where she was.

Any time she brought this up to Dr. Niterus, he assured her once again that she would be fine. There was no way he could make that kind of a promise, but his confidence in his outrageous word grew as the epidemic grew worse, while still avoiding Dalia.

There was something wrong in the hospital. Dalia couldn't put her finger on it, but she was noticing it more and more every day.

The number of people dying of a relatively simple disease in a hospital was questionable to begin with, but she had been seeing things lately that could not be easily explained away. As much as she wanted to believe they were more nightmares, she knew that was a lie.

The doctors were doing something wrong. She caught them messing around with drugs. They were opening things they shouldn't have and mixing them. They threw out bottles and refilled them with water or saline. She had literally watched Sally fill a syringe with saline when she had thought Dalia was asleep.

And then there was the bird man.

She had seen his silhouette and thought it was a part of her nightmares, but she was seeing him prowling the hospital when she was most definitely awake. The bird man was real, and he was running around the hospital while all of the other weird shit was happening. She doubted that this was a coincidence.

Alone at night, she sat up and waited for him until she fell asleep.

She realized that she fell asleep around the same time every night. She realized that her deep sleep was strange, in hindsight.

That was when she realized that she was being fucked with. So she stopped drinking the water. She poured it down the drain and left the empty bottle by her empty tray, just like always. She had known immediately that it had to be the water. The food changed daily, but the water always came, and it was always opened.

How could she have been so stupid? How could she have not realized that she was being drugged?

Dalia tried to stay as coherent as possible, all the time. She pretended to fall fast asleep at the same time, but she was on the defensive now. She was watching.

The bird man walked by her door sometimes. She thought it was odd that it didn't scare her. The bird man was something she felt she knew well. Maybe because she had seen him in her "dreams" before. She couldn't tell. She just know that she was watching it skirt past her door like it was just another part of her day.

Dalia had to leave soon. She didn't say anything to Josh though. She didn't want him in on the weirdness that she was experiencing. She could handle this by herself.

Dr. Niterus watched her from the corner of his eye now. He looked amused whenever she turned around and caught him staring at her. He knew that she knew something. He knew. He was watching her and he had caught on to her. She liked that thought. She was a part of the madness now, and not some poor victim of the hospital.

She wasn’t sure how much Niterus himself was in on, but he was the head of the hospital. He had to know something. He had to know that the doctors were responsible for gross misconduct, and he had to know about the bird man.

The weird part was that, if he did know, he didn’t care. He had to be okay with it.

Then it made sense. Of course he could promise that she wouldn’t get sick, because he was responsible for the illness in the hospital. It was a horrible thought, but it was the only thing that made any sense.

As soon as she thought it, there was some peace in that thought. Now, she understood the mystery; it had been solved. Now, she could relax and plan a way to get out.

Dalia was right in thinking that Niterus noticed her wakefulness at night. It was not what he had wanted, per se, but it was reassuring to him in a way he hadn’t expected. She may have been unwell at the moment, but she was not as helpless as he had worried she would be. She was still the quick, cunning woman who had been more than capable of taking care of herself.

She would be back. Dalia was going to be okay.

. . . . .

"I have to get out of here," she told him over and over. "People keep getting sicker and sicker, and I'm fine now. I want to get out of here while I'm still well enough to."

They didn’t talk much more about the sickness in the hospital. They both understood what was going on, and neither of them was going to say anything about it out loud.

"I don't feel like you leaving now is what's best for you," he finally told her. "But, if you want to sign yourself out, I can't stop you."

That was what she had been waiting to hear. She was finally going to be free again. She had no clear memory of what that was like, but she had an idea that it would be better than what she was doing now.

"I'll do it then," she announced. "I'm signing myself out."

Dr. Niterus knew he had lost this battle, but there was nothing more he could do. He had help up his end of the bargain and it was over now.

He didn't doubt that she would be in danger as soon as she left the walls of Mercy Hospital. She would be a moving target once she was on her own, with only Josh to defend her. She should have been able to defend herself marvelously, but if she could remember that, then there wouldn't have been a problem to begin with.

Things could only go wrong.

"You have my number on your release papers," Dr. Niterus informed her. "Feel free to call my office if anything starts to become a problem."

"I will," she promised. She had no intention of ever calling him again though. She planned on disappearing from this place and staying low until she remembered what she was supposed to be doing.

Josh seemed just as upset about her leaving as Dr. Niterus was, but he tried to keep it to himself as much as he could. He was on her side and she needed to remember that. So he pretended like he was supporting her decision.

Josh drove her to her apartment. She didn't want to get back in a car - something about it still made her nervous - but she forced herself to get into the passenger seat and buckle herself in.

"How far away do I live?"

Josh kept his eyes trained on the road ahead of him. "About ten minutes. We're not too far."  
She was relieved to hear that. It meant she wouldn't have to be in the car very much longer. Dalia was ready to have her feet on solid ground again.


	3. Fragments & Clues

The apartment complex looked just like all the other buildings around it, but she felt a sense of familiarity when Josh pulled into the parking lot and parked.

"Alright. This is it," he announced. "Do you remember the number? Or the floor?"

Dalia tried to bring her mind around to the information he was asking her for, but she was drawing a blank. "I don't know. I know it's not on the bottom floor. I know I have a balcony looking out and down."

Josh was visibly impressed. "That's right. See? You're getting there."

He felt more confident than he had in a long time. Even the creeping fear as they left the car and walked up to the stairs was almost drowned out by it.

He led her three floors up, to a hall that felt like home from the moment they stepped into it. She knew her door. That much she could identify.

Josh gave her the keys and let her unlock it for herself. It felt symbolic to him for her to do it.  
The smell of the apartment hit her first, and she wanted to bury herself in it. This was a scent she couldn't give a name to, but it smelled like home.

Her apartment was still in perfect order, just like she had left it. She liked the looks of it. It looked like a place that she would want to live.

"Thanks for taking care of it, I guess," she said. "I appreciate it."

"Oh, anytime." He hoped he wouldn't be asked to leave. He had rooted himself firmly in the doorway. "So, this all looks familiar to you?"

"Yeah, I think so." Some of it made sense to her rattled mind. "Why did I frame a leaf?"

Josh felt like he had been punched in the gut. The one thing he had been sure would be the most obvious to her was the one she didn't recognize at all. "It's important to you, Dalia," he explained gently. "You need to remember yourself. It's something that I can't just explain to you."  
She hated it when he said things like that, but she didn't argue.

"Okay. Well, I'll remember eventually, I guess."

He felt less optimistic than before. He was starting to realize how bad this could really be. If she could look right at the leaf and not remember the most important part of her life, how far had she really gone? And would she ever be back?

“I think I should stay with you for a while,” Josh suggested. “You need someone around to help you out. You don’t even remember all of your apartment. I should be here to help you get around.”

That was the last thing Dalia wanted to do, but she didn’t think she was in a position to argue with this. He was right. She really did need some help since she didn’t know what was going on in what used to be her own home.

“Whatever,” Dalia shrugged. “Yeah, sleep on the couch.”

“Okay. I can do that.” He was glad she had agreed. He was worried that she would need someone to watch out for her. She would be an easy target now that she had left the care of Dr. Niterus.

Dalia slipped into her bedroom and locked the door behind her. She was pretty sure she could trust Josh, but not sure enough that she wasn’t going to be taking precautions. There was a difference between a reasonable amount of trust and sheer stupidity.

Her bedroom was just as simple as the rest of her home. It was a white bed in a wood-floor room. There was a dresser and a closet. There were a few candles on her dresser and a thin poem book. It was a small Yeats collection that looked like she had opened it many times before. That made it seem like something she probably liked a lot. She made a mental note to start reading through that tonight. It might jog her memory. She liked to think lines would come to her as she read it.

Most of all, she wanted the leaf to make sense to her. When she had said that she didn’t remember it, Josh had looked so deflated that she knew it had to mean something massive to both of them.  
Dalia went back into the kitchen and began looking through her cabinets for food.

“Have you cleaned out my fridge?” Dalia thought to ask. “Is it safe for me to open this thing?”

“There’s nothing spoiled in there,” Josh promised her. “I threw out your milk that went bad and I ate your eggs before they got rotten.”

The only other things in the fridge were some condiments and a few blocks of cheese that were still a few weeks away from going bad. She took the sharp cheddar out and dug around her kitchen drawers for scissors or a small kitchen knife.

“What are you looking for?” Josh asked.

“Something to open this with.”

“Why?”

Wasn’t it obvious? “I’m gonna eat some cheese. I’m starving. I’m fucking sick of hospital food.”

Josh shook his head with the most genuine smile he’s had on his face all day. “Whatever, Dal. Your scissors are right here.” He opened the drawer closest to him and produced the kitchen shears.

Dalia didn’t think she liked that nickname. She took the shears and cut the cheese wrapper opened. “I live off things like this,” she said. “I can’t remember the last time I bought stuff to make a meal.”

“I don’t know how you’ve managed to live like that,” Josh said. “You’re good at surviving though.”

Josh wasn’t stupid enough to believe that her unnatural ability not to die was all her own, but it was impressive nonetheless. She was better at it than him, so some of it had to be a natural talent of hers.

Even though she was better at surviving than him – and he was pretty damn good – he began going through the apartment, making sure all the windows were locked and unmovable. He wished there was more he could do to secure them, but he knew that even the locks wouldn’t help them if things got worse. Nothing could help them. Closing the windows and door was just a hollow motion, but it made him feel better.

Dalia watched him with narrowed eyes. "What are you afraid of, Josh?"

"This isn't the best neighborhood." That wasn't even a lie. She lived in a shady area. "There have been a bunch of breakins lately."

"This high up?"

"Higher," he lied. "An apartment a couple floors up got hit from a window a while ago. Fire escapes, you know."

That was a good enough lie that Dalia looked a little uneasy. "Anyone hurt?"

"Not that I know of. Still scary though."

If it had been two years ago, he could have told her that someone in the building had just been shot. Bad things had happened in Dalia's building, but no one would dare trespass on Dalia's home. It was protected from the average human. They got a sense of unease at the threshhold. The old ladies down the hall wouldn't even come in to give her cookies when they moved in. This apartment had been touched by something dark, and it was impossible not to feel a trace of it if you weren't expecting it.

There were things scarier than the average human though, and that feeling that hung in the air would not deter them. Dalia ate a half of the cheese block and put the rest back in the fridge.

"I think I'm gonna take a shower," she announced.

Josh nodded but didn't otherwise acknowledge her.

She locked herself in the bathroom too. Her bathroom was the size of a closet. She wasn't claustrophobic though. The small space made her feel secure.

When she took her shirt off, she paused to study her back in the mirror. There was something she had noticed in the hospital that she couldn't stop checking out.

On the back of her right shoulder was a tattoo. It wouldn't have been so odd, except she felt that it had to be personal. It wasn't some tacky dragon or a name or a flower. It was something that she had to have a story behind. It wasn't the kind of thing you got because it was fashionable.

It was a circle. Just a black circle, but with an X through it, the corners of which stuck out the sides of the circle. It was a symbol for something, but she couldn't remember what and it drove her crazy.

She forced herself to look away from it though. She would stare at it and try to make sense of it forever if she allowed herself. She wanted to take a shower and relax in her apartment for a while.  
She forced the image out of her mind and took a hot shower. She turned the water up as high as she could, which wasn't what she'd hoped. Still, it was warm enough that it made her skin pink. There was so much she wanted to wash away. She had left the madness of the hospital behind and she was washing her hands of the mess. She didn't want to think about any of the secrets she was keeping of her time there.

For some reason, she still couldn’t be upset about her suspicion that the doctors were making people ill. She couldn’t be upset that people were dying. She couldn’t hold it against Niterus that he had drugged her and that he was allowing the hospital to be turned into a breeding ground for filth and disease. Somehow, she knew that things were as they should be. This was something necessary. She would keep quiet about it.

The things God did were not always kind either, but they were necessary. Dr. Niterus’ acts were the same.

After she was dressed again, she checked the windows and door too. Josh’s paranoia was starting to rub off on her. She hated that, but it was probably unavoidable.

Dalia tried watching TV for a while. She remembered quickly that she had never enjoyed television all that much, but she was bored out of her mind and she needed something to do; some sound of normality.

“Josh, do I have a laptop?” she wanted to know.

Josh was sitting at the kitchen table making a grocery list. He didn’t think he could live off the small amount of food that Dalia normally did. “Um, I think you do. Did you look under your bed?”

She hadn’t. She hadn’t even thought of that. She left the couch and went to her bedroom to peer under her bed.

There it was, just as Josh had predicted. She took it out of its leather case and brought it back to the living room to plug it in by the couch. The password was 3x0h. Her fingers remembered it a split second before her brain. She didn’t try to think too hard about what it was supposed to mean. It just made her think of her back and the tattoo that doesn’t make any sense to her.

The background was the standard one that had come with the computer. She hadn’t expected any cute, colorful backdrops or photos from a family vacation, so she wasn’t surprised by it.

There were a few folders named after people. All that was in them was a few documents with names, dates, addresses, etc. It was like a very well-organized and detailed address book. Maybe that was what it was.

There were photos in the one labeled “Jacob Effidge.” Pictures of a man walking around town, getting into his car, sitting in a bar. There was one of the same man, sleeping. That was the one that bothered her and she immediately closed the file.

There were photos in some of the others but Dalia tried not to focus on them.

But one more picture caught her eye. It was in the file marked “Mary Laureate.” She tried to scroll past it in the file, but she caught a glimpse of one that disturbed her for some reason. There was something off about it.

The picture was of a young woman sitting at a table. She was bent forward with her face propped up in her hands. Her hair hung down around her face. Her eyes were hardly visible, but they looked like they might be opened. It was a perfectly normal image, but something about it felt wrong.

The room in the photo was dark, but Dalia thought she could make out a dark stain on her shirt. Most of her shirt. Dalia couldn’t tell what it was and her imagination was starting to get the better of her so she closed the photo.

That was not blood, she decided. And, if it was, it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

Dalia didn’t say a word to Josh about it. She was done dealing with this shit. She’d look over it all again when her mind was mostly back.

She pulled up the internet and did a search for her name in Google’s news section. She was hoping to find her story. Maybe something from her accident. Not much luck, so she tried to be more specific with her search.

When she tried searching car accidents in the area from around the time of her hospital admission, she found one small article. Just a quick report. Her car had been stopped and had been hit from behind. She’d been pulled over, so she guessed the driver of the other car was drunk or something.

But, no. The woman hadn’t been drunk. She’d apparently just been super crazy. She’d been arrested or something. She’d been screaming something about Dalia being some kind of monster and she apparently had to kill her.

“You were there when I got hit, right?” Dalia asked Josh. He was on his way out the door, but she caught him with her question first.

“Um, yeah.” He sounded suddenly nervous. “Yeah, I was across the street. You’d just dropped me off. Why?”

“Was the lady in the other car really calling me a monster?”

Josh went pale. “Did you remember that?”

“No.” Dalia laughed. “I imagine I was out cold then. I read it in an article.”

Once again, his hopes were shot down. “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, she was screaming her head off. She called you a monster and she said she had to kill you before you got her.”

“So, I’m in this position because a crazy woman was allowed to drive a car?” Dalia had personally hoped it was something cooler than random insanity.

“Pretty much.”

Dalia sighed heavily and closed the window the story was in.

“I’m going to the store now,” Josh told her. “Keep the doors locked and don’t let anyone in, okay?”  
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’m a big girl. I can be left alone.”

Josh was reluctant to leave, but he did. He left her alone after insisting that she came over and locked the door lock, the deadbolt, and the chain.

When she was alone, Dalia had an idea. She knew how she would get into her own brain a little more. She pulled up her browser history, hoping to find something interesting that would give her some idea of what kind of internet person she was.

It looked like she had erased her history just a while ago, because the history began three days before her accident and ended the night before.

She was on Pandora a lot. That made sense, because she liked the idea of having music playing in the background as she went about her day. Her stations were things like classical and Cake. She liked Cake.

She had browsed creepy stories online, because she apparently enjoyed things like that. She had done that a lot. She had a few blogs bookmarked, but none of them seemed interesting to her at first glance. This seemed boring to her.

After the failed attempt at regaining some of her history, Dalia closed her computer and curled up on the couch to watch the news and wait for Josh. There wasn’t ever anything interesting going on in the news. People died, weather fucked things up, and then something to do with puppies came on, so the viewer wouldn’t get too depressed about the state of the world. Boring.

She must have fallen asleep, because she dreamed. It was an unsettling and unsatisfying sleep. She heard a constant whisper in the back of her mind, but not really words. Later, she would guess that it was the buzz of the television being interpreted in her dream by her tired brain.

There were no words. No one in the dream said anything. The trees blew in the wind and the branches moved in an unnatural way. It was a cold night. There was a scratching sound in the background, above the whispers. People walked past her, but no one said anything and she didn’t try to say anything to them. She was listening to the scratching from the forest.

She was trying to walk into the woods, but she couldn’t push through the crowds moving past her. She couldn’t get into the woods and she couldn’t turn around. She couldn’t escape the sounds, or investigate them.

The people walking around were faceless except for the eyes. Their eyes were huge and white. But when one grabbed a hold of her shoulders, a mouth ripped opened out of its face. And it screamed.

But that wasn’t why her eyes opened. Her eyes opened because someone was knocking on her door. It was a frantic banging sound. She stood up slowly and went to the door to look through the peephole.

Josh was standing on her doorstep with grocery bags sitting around him, looking frantic. He was banging on her door and calling her name. She unlocked the three locks and opened the door for him.

“I’ve been knocking for five minutes. I thought something had happened to you.”

He looked terrified. His eyes were wild.

“I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry, but that was because she wasn’t. He shouldn’t have had her lock all of the locks – even the two that he didn’t have keys for or couldn’t possibly unlock from the outside – if he was just gonna get pissed at her when he couldn’t get in. She couldn’t help that she fell asleep. “I guess I must have been taking a nap or something.”

The thought of her sleeping more than she needed to made Josh uneasy. In the hospital, sleep had been a good thing for her, safe under the influence of the good doctor. Now, she was more vulnerable in her sleep. Her mind was a blank slate now.

There was no real way to protect them, but Josh had to try something. He covered the mirrors with sheets from Dalia’s linen closet while she was sleeping. He scribbled little symbols on the windows and set glasses on the windowsills, so they would be knocked off if anyone tried to come in. That wouldn’t stop anything, but it would make a noise loud enough to wake them up. He wanted to be awake if anything came for them.

He had made sure there were candles (unlit, of course) on Dalia’s windowsill before she locked herself in her room and fell asleep. With her door locked, it would be hard to get to her if something got into her room, but it would still be good to know. And he had gotten into locked doors before.  
There was a gun in the linen closet. It was probably loaded, since Dalia was the kind of person who kept a loaded gun hidden in her home. He would shoot the doorknob off if he had to.  
He just hoped he could figure out how to use a gun.

The apartment was quiet and Josh thought he would be able to sleep just fine, but he couldn’t do it. His eyes wouldn’t stay shut. They snapped opened at every imagined sound or every grisly visual that popped into his head. He ended up turning the lamp on. He couldn’t sleep in the dark.

He had been like this once before. Once, he had been afraid of everything. He checked under his bed and in his closet, he slept with the lights on, he pulled his covers over his head at night so he could feel safe. That used to be his life. He had been promised that he would never be afraid again, in exchange for his obedience, but Master was growing angry with him. He knew because he had been feeling more and more afraid of the dark lately. Now, he was terrified. Now, there was something truly terrifying out there, and Master had abandoned him to it. How did Master expect him to protect her and lead her back, all by himself, without any protection?

Well, the answer was clear, wasn’t it? He didn’t.

The apartment remained silent throughout the night, as Josh drifted in and out of sleep. Nothing stirred. No glasses came crashing down. The pipes groaned sometimes and the neighbors would walk from time to time. Everything was fine.

Dalia wasn’t asleep either. She was lying in bed, trying to remember other nights she had slept in this bed. Surely, she had other memories of staring at this same ceiling on nights when she couldn’t sleep. But none came to her.

When she shut her eyes, she didn’t see anything at all. No more weird visuals and no distant memories. Just blackness.

At around one in the morning, she finally nodded off. Her mind was full of whispers and none of them made any sense. She couldn’t make them out. Her dreams were normal and jumbled, except for the whispers.


	4. The Kind of Girl I Am

“You look like shit,” Dalia informed Josh while she was making coffee the next morning.

Josh started at the sudden sound of her voice. He had been drifting off. “Yeah, um, I didn’t sleep well.”

Dalia laughed. “Why? Bad dreams?”

Josh looked startled. “Why do you ask? Did you have bad dreams?”

“Not bad dreams.” She paused to think. “I don’t think I had any good dreams. I don’t remember any of them, now that you mention it. It was just pretty loud.”

“Loud, how?”

“Background noise,” she explained. “Voices and stuff.”

“You’re hearing voices?”

Dalia was once again unsure why she told Josh anything. He made a production out of every little thing she said. “In my dreams? Yeah.”  
None of that was weird, but she was sure Josh was weirded out because he was the most paranoid person she had ever met. She was sure it was difficult for him not to jump at his own shadow.

“Did it freak you out? Were they bothering you?”

“I couldn’t understand them, Josh. They didn’t matter. It was just stupid background chatter.” She decided he didn’t need coffee. He was jumpy enough. “They were totally inconsequential, but I’m sure I’ll have to convince you now that they weren’t the devil or anything, trying to tell me all the people I need to brutally murder, since you seem to think everything is a sign of impending doom.”

Josh didn’t think it was a good time to argue with her. She would know pretty soon that he was right and that everything was a sign of impending doom.

She still wasn’t afraid of anything. That was something she had kept, even after her accident. Master always liked her best. Of course she was still feeling the effects of her deal.  
Dalia knew that she liked her coffee black. She knew where she kept her mugs. It confused her that some memories were so simply there, while others had vanished. Why did she get to remember how she liked her coffee, but she couldn’t remember her tattoo or that damned leaf?

While she drank, she noticed the glasses on the sills of the windows. She hadn’t thought anything of the candles on her windowsill – it made sense that those would be there – but this was just weird.

“Josh, are you trying to get all of my glasses broken?” she wanted to know. “And which ones are clean and which ones are dirty? What the fuck were you doing?”

Josh considered pretending that he didn’t know what she was talking about, but that would have been stupid. A lie would just make him look dumb, because she had to know that it was him who had done it. “I sat them there when I was wiping the counter down. I guess I forgot about them.”

It astounded Dalia, in that moment, how stupid her only friend was. “Josh, if you were taking the time to wipe down the fucking counter, why didn’t you just wash the cups while you were at it? And some of those had to have come out of the cabinet, unless you decided you needed a new cup for every drink last night. Were you wiping down the cabinet too?”

Josh shrugged. “I don’t even remember why I did it. Let’s just forget it.”

“You are such a freak,” Dalia scowled. “I have no fucking clue what goes on in your head sometimes.”

Josh had initially been excited that Dalia acted so similar to her old self once she started talking again. He was beginning to remember what a bitch Dalia was most of the time. He wasn’t sure why he had missed her in the first place, because she wasn’t very nice to him most of the time.

Before she could ask him to do it, Josh got up and started gathering up the glasses and putting them in the sink.

“So, any idea why I was going to a bunch of blogs before my accident?” Dalia had remembered that he was useful for some things again.

“Um, you kinda spent a lot of time fucking with people who write crazy horror blogs.” That seemed like a fair enough explanation. It was a perfect oversimplification. “You get into a trolling mood sometimes, I guess. I never really understood it.”

“Trolling? Seriously?”

Josh shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t get it.”

Puzzled by this, Dalia got on her laptop again and went to one of the blogs in her history. It was just white text on a black backdrop. It was some guy going on about how he was being stalked by something. He went on about how he was seeing a strange figure and about how he was getting sick all the time. It was weird. But all of the responses were weirder.

She had thought her comment – and, likewise, her username – would be easy to pick out, but there were plenty of nasty responses to any given post.  
One was particularly vicious. He had made a post about how his girlfriend was just missing. He was freaking out. Some of the responses were sympathetic, but some were brutal.

Prox1300: You’re next. Should have listened to me.

D3liv3r3r: There’s no escape. There’s no way to run. He’s coming.

Bl4nk: You won’t be posting much longer. Might wanna tell your readers goodbye.

Ag3nt110: Haha. You thought you could get away. You thought you could keep them safe. No one is safe. He is coming.

L3av3s3y3s: Boo hoo. You won’t find her, you know. And no one will find you. No one escapes him. You are not special, worm. Your girlfriend was no special. Say goodbye to your little internet friends. Say goodbye to everything, because you’re running out of time. Tick fucking tock.

None of these could be her. This was bizarre. This was also kind of shitty, even for her. She really hoped this would make sense to her when she started to remember everything. Or not. She wouldn’t mind if this part didn’t make sense. This was clearly one of the weirder parts of her life.

“I’m thinking of going for a walk,” Dalia announced. “I’m bored as fuck.”

“You’ll get lost,” Josh argued. “What if you don’t remember the way?”

“I’m good at directions. I’ll figure it out. Plus, I think I remember the way home.”

Josh wanted to argue, but she was already on her way out the door. She made sure to put her door key in her pocket, but she doubted it would be useful because Josh would probably put the chain on the door and add seven more impossible locks.

The neighborhood wasn’t that great. She remembered that now. She didn’t feel all that nervous though. This was her home.

Besides, everyone she passed on the street went out of their way to put an extra foot or two of space between her and them. If anyone needed to be afraid, it was clearly them. Something seemed to be scary about her.

She walked a couple of blocks before turning around. She didn’t know what she had even thinking. It was freezing cold. There was nothing to see. She had just wanted to get away from Josh.

Dalia returned home and ignored Josh for the rest of the night, before falling into another restless sleep.


	5. Old Enemies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beginning of Act 2: The Games Begin

Much to Josh's surprise, the next week passed without incident. No one and nothing came for them, but Dalia also didn't remember anything else about anything that was really important. It was a win/lose situation.

Week two started to get odd though. Josh was still staying with Dalia since she couldn't remember a few key things still, but she was getting more and more reluctant and he was suspecting that he would be kicked out soon.

Dalia was feeling more comfortable in her old home, so she went out more and more. She took the bus around town to places she remembered having gone to, and she was remembering more and more.

The first place she remembered being was this park a few blocks away from her house. She didn’t go at first, but she eventually realized that she legitimately missed her time there. So she headed over one afternoon.

It wasn’t all that impressive a place. There was a play area for kids and benches and a gazebo for people to sit around and enjoy the view of the woods from.

Dalia used to sit in the gazebo and look out into the woods. She could watch deer if she came later at night. She watched the birds and read to herself. She also liked to sit around and take pictures. She was a people-watcher sometimes. That was probably a little creepy, but she had vivid memories of taking pictures in this park, and they were all of people.

That explained the pictures on her computer, with the exception of the one weird one that she tried not to think too hard about.

At a park that she used to stop by sometimes, she ran into someone who seemed familiar, in the worst way. It was a young woman - younger than her thirty one years - with messy blond hair. She was tall and slim and dressed far too revealingly for the weather. She was wrapped in some purple dress that was cut too low on top and too high on the bottom.

Dalia knew instantly that she did not like this woman.

"How have you been, Dalia?" She sounded sweet on the surface, but there was something bitter underneath it.

Dalia didn't remember ever having spoken to this woman she inexplicably disliked, but she decided she might as well pretend. "Just got out of the hospital."

"I heard about that," the stranger said. "We've all heard about it. It's about time someone finally tried taking you out."

That one caught Dalia off guard. She couldn't say that was something that she had expected to hear. It disturbed her, but she didn’t want to let that on. Weakness disgusted her, so she decided she would make a joke about that instead. "Well, you know. Sometimes, someone gets that lucky shot in."

"I almost wish I would have thought of it," the stranger said, arms crossed over her pale, partly-exposed breasts. "But you look like you bounced back pretty well. That's one of the reasons why I'd never want to try to kill you if I could. You'd just survive it and then come back to taunt me."  
Dalia grinned. "Probably."

The stranger watched her blankly for a second or two, like she was waiting for something, and then she raised an eyebrow. "That's all you have to say? You're passing up a chance to enjoy some of our infamous banter? How hard did you hit your head on that windshield?"

Without thinking about it, Dalia touched her fingers to her forehead. "Pretty hard, actually. I'm not really bouncing back as well as I look like I am."

"Is that why you don't look like you wanna hurt me today?"

"Yep."

The stranger sighed and sat down on the bench next to Dalia. "I hoped that you'd be okay by the time I got to talk to you. It's boring when you're not you. Trying to fuck with you isn't fun when you don't even remember that you hate me."

"Excuse me?"

"I was testing you," the stranger sighed. "I'd heard that your memory was fucked, but I was hoping it was wrong. But I guess they were right."

There were so many questions that she could ask here. She wanted to know who was talking about her injury, and why it mattered. She wanted to know why this woman was so intent on fucking with her, and what it meant that she had failed this bizarre test. But she settled on a more casual question that she felt she could trust this strange woman to answer truthfully. "So, why don't you help me out?"

There was genuine sorrow in the stranger's eyes. This was not the confrontation she had looked forward to. "Eliza, remember? Your old buddy Eliza."

"Buddy?" She couldn't picture herself being "buddies" with anyone like this woman. She was sure that she hated this woman.

Eliza grinned. "Your favorite arch nemesis. The woman you've been locked in bitter competition with for years. I can't believe this is happening."

"I'm sorry I forgot my arch nemesis." And Dalia was being legitimate this time. That sounded like one of the most interesting parts of her life and she had lost it somehow. She also wanted to know what she and Eliza were competing for in the first place. "Maybe it'll come back to me."

"I hope it does," Eliza said. "My life wouldn't be as fun if you weren't there to torment. But, I guess things just are the way they are. And now we have to live with the consequences. I'm really sorry about the way this story's gonna have to go now."

Dalia frowned. She could not avert this now. She had to ask a serious question. "What the fuck does that mean?"

Eliza smiled and patted Dalia on the shoulder. "It means exactly what it sounds like it means, Dal. Good luck."

With that obscure and discomforting message, Eliza rose from the bench and walked away from the gazebo, leaving Dalia in a stunned silence.

That was not the last Dalia would hear from Eliza, but it was her reintroduction and it left quite an impression on Dalia.

Eliza was a distant memory, but Dalia knew she was important and she remembered some tension between them. Obviously it was more than a little tension between them, because Eliza was supposedly her favorite arch nemesis. That had to be an intense level of disdain and competitiveness.  
Dalia walked back in a daze, with her mind swimming with snapshots of a tiny blond in skimpy purple silk and a devious smirk.

Eliza trudged home from her meeting with Dalia, disappointed. She understood that Dalia was her target now, and that this was a good thing for some. It still saddened her that she had lost her adversary. She may soon gain a valuable ally, but it was nothing compared to her loss. And what if Dalia’s whole personality changed with their success? She would regret it forever.

But then she was nervous. She realized what she had just done. Instead of trying to learn something about Dalia’s condition, she had tried to jog her memory. She had been indiscreet and clumsy. She wasn’t looking forward to her return.

She went directly to her bedroom and curled up in her bed with the blankets over her head. She pretended that she was tired until she almost believed it, but she was hiding.

Of course it was stupid to try to hide, but it was a survival instinct.

Eliza realized she couldn’t stay like this and she sat up in bed.

Just as she got up, she heard the television turn on in the other room.

“Brooke?” she called into the living room. “Are you home?”

There was no answer from the living room and that put her on edge as she climbed out of bed and crept around the corner.

There was Brooke, flipping channels on the television.

Eliza breathed a sigh of relief, but her relief was tempered by annoyance. “Brooke, I called your name and you didn’t answer. I thought the TV was turning itself on or someone had broken in or something.”

Brooke shrugged. “Yeah, I don’t care.”

Eliza sighed and sat down on the couch next to her roommate. “Please don’t flip channels so much. You never know what we’ll pick up.”

Brooke frowned. “Why do you care? We pick up all kinds of things. It’s not even a big deal anymore.”  
The channels that everyone else saw as static used to bother her when she was younger, but she was used to them now. She watched all kinds of weird shit on the hidden channels when she was bored. She watched movies that hardly anyone knew existed and demented shows that she’d watched as a child. They used to scare her, but now they were fairly interesting. Still weird, but didn’t give her nightmares anymore.

“I don’t wanna see anything today,” Eliza insisted.

That made Brooke smile. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

“Maybe,” Eliza admitted. “I don’t know, but I think I might be.”

“Think hard,” Brooke instructed. “I’m sure it’ll come to you.”

Eliza didn’t need to think very hard. She was sure she knew the answer. She had done something bad and she knew she was in trouble. She stared uneasily at the television, expecting to see something horrible.

About six years ago, she had started seeing images of her own life on the screen for the first time. She had watched creepy things late at night on unlisted channels since she was little. She had watched shows her friends hadn’t heard of and movies that she couldn’t find anywhere else. But she was fifteen when she started seeing herself and her life on the screen.

She never told anyone. They already thought she was going crazy. No one would have believed her.  
Sometimes she saw it again. She would get a recap of anything and everything she had done wrong that day or week. It scared her. She wanted to look away, but she never could. She was waiting for it to happen now. Nothing came of her fear though.

“Guess what’s on?” Brooke asked.

Eliza squinted at the screen and tried to remember exactly what she was seeing. It was some black-and-white movie. She knew she had seen it before, but the name wouldn’t come to her. “Is it a movie or a show? I don’t remember this.”

“TV show.” Brooke gave her a hint. “I used to watch it when I was a little girl. I think you did too.”  
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”

Brooke shook her head. “Okay, I’ll help you. It’s about a bunch of kids and their imaginary friend.”  
Eliza scowled. “The imaginary friend that eventually kills all of their families? That show?”

Brooke smiled and nodded. “That show. With all the cartoony blood and everything. You remember?”  
Eliza remembered. She had watched it when she was little too. Not very many episodes though, because it scared her. She stopped watching after they had skinned someone. She didn’t have the stomach for it. “I hated this show.”

“I think I liked it for some reason,” Brooke mused. “Of course, I hated my family. I guess I liked the idea a little. I think I took some inspiration from it when I finally killed them.”

Now Eliza felt a little silly for being scared because nothing apparently bothered her roommate. She decided to stay in the room and watch it with Brooke.

The episode they were watching was one that Eliza had never seen before, but she had seen so few that it didn’t surprise her. This was after all the mangling of family members, it seemed, and the kids were wreaking havoc in the town. It wasn’t as bad as she remembered, but the design of the imaginary friend still freaked her out to look at too long.

The commercials were the weirdest part, to be honest. They were for products that didn’t make any sense, and sometimes they weren’t for products at all. Sometimes the people in them just stared at you, and that was why Eliza hated watching them.

Today, they were staring. Brooke met their eyes without hesitation, but Eliza didn’t.

One of the people in the shot put a hand up against the screen and Eliza thought briefly that they might push their hand through. He opened his mouth and made this horrible groaning sound.

“What the fuck, Brooke?” Eliza muttered.

Brooke shrugged.

Inside the mouth of the man on screen, there was a scene playing out in unnaturally fast motions. It was murky, but it was clearly two women sitting and talking. Their hands were moving around fast and with a weird, shaky motion, like they were being jerked around with strings. They were puppets. Of course they were puppets. Eliza was beginning to get the joke now.

The blond puppet had a face like a wooden doll. It was sharp, angular, and shiny. Her features were painted too bright and the smile was jagged-looking. The brunette puppet had no face at all. They were jerking their arms around and flailing and smashing into each other from time to time. Eliza didn’t want to think too much about what any of this meant.

“I think you are in trouble,” Brooke concluded. “Is the blond one supposed to be you?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

The scene went on for a few minutes before the program came back on.

“What does that mean?” Eliza asked. “What do you think I’m supposed to do? What was she trying to tell me?”

“I think just that she knows. She saw you.” Brooke sounded annoyed though, since her show was back on and she was trying to keep her attention on that. “It doesn’t matter. If she really wanted you to do something, she would have given you actual directions. Just leave it alone. That was just to fuck with you.”

Eliza took the hint and got quiet. They watched together in silence as the children that were supposed to be the heroes began hacking through a water pipe.

Dalia started throwing up at noon. It happened so randomly that she couldn’t put her finger on what had caused it. She had had a headache all day, but it wasn’t bad enough to make her throw up, and she hadn’t been nauseas until the second before she started throwing up.

At first, she was throwing up the remains of the small breakfast she had eaten that morning, but after a while it was just black. By the time she had stopped, she was so weak and dizzy that she had to crawl back to her bedroom.

Josh came to stand in the doorway of her room and ask her if she was okay. By this point, she was on her bed but she hadn’t tried to get under the covers yet. She wasn’t sure if she was going to try it yet.

“I’m throwing up,” Dalia pointed out. “Do I look okay?”

“Have you been sleeping?” he asked.

“Not really,” she admitted. “Does that matter? I don’t think not sleeping makes you vomit until you have literally nothing left in your stomach.”

“You never know.” Josh shrugged. “You haven’t been feeling great, you haven’t been sleeping that well. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

She wasn’t sure that he even remembered what they were arguing about. Her overall poor health was not the topic. It was whether or not her sleeping habits had anything to do with all of the vomiting that had just occurred. She wanted to stab him sometimes. It was a lovely thought that came unbidden to her.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” he asked.

Because he apparently was still having trouble staying on topic. “What the fuck is up with you and dreams? I am fucking sick, okay? Can we talk about our fucking dreams later?”

“So, you’re having bad dreams?”

“I wish I had thrown up on you right now,” she grumbled. “Yes, dipshit. I’m having bad dreams. That happens to people sometimes, especially when they’re stuck with a terrible excuse for a friend after her fucking face got smashed into a windshield.”

“Are you still hearing that whispering in your dreams?”

Dalia used what little strength was left in her arms to take the nearest pillow to her and throw it at the doorway, but it didn’t hit her intended target. “Yes. Kind of. Why are we still talking about this? Just leave me the fuck alone so I can sleep whatever bug I’ve picked up off.”

“I’m just trying to help you,” he insisted. “I need to know what kinds of things are bothering you in dreams. It could help. We could maybe learn something about you that you’re forgetting.”

“Or you could just tell me all about myself, because you fucking know,” she snapped.

“That won’t be that great for you,” Josh argued. “It’ll be so much better if you come up with all of this yourself.”

This was not something that she had time for right now. She didn’t even feel like lifting her head off of the bed. She didn’t feel like she was going to throw up anymore, but she still felt weak from it.  
“Fucking whispers and random people and shit, okay? It’s nothing important. Please just go away.”  
Josh gave up and wandered off. He didn’t think he was doing anything to help her at this point. He was just in her way.

In reality, the whispers were getting worse. She had to admit that much. It wasn’t helping her headaches at all. She woke up with headaches and the whispers didn’t stop when she woke up anymore. She heard it in the moments after she had just woken up and sometimes before she fell asleep.

That wasn’t why she was sick though. She had picked a bug up or she had eaten something wrong. It was something simple with her stomach.

She started to think more and more that something was wrong with her after as her headaches and nightmares started to get worse. It started to become apparent when she started hearing the whispering after she had woken up. At first, just the moment she woke up, but then it would last for a minute or so while she was lying in her bed. Then she would get them when she was lying in bed before she fell asleep. She was starting to think that she had missed something about her head injury. She was experiencing something weird now from some brain damage, and she would probably need to go back to the hospital at some point.

Josh had thought about taking her back when she had started getting sick, but she wouldn’t have allowed it. She would have hated him for it and she wouldn’t have gone. He would have been thrown out and she would be alone, cooped up, and sick in bed. It wouldn’t have made anything better, and it might have actually made everything worse. He kept his mouth shut.

For the next few days, Dalia spent most of her time in bed. She got out of bed to get to the bathroom and to get extra blankets out of the linen closet because her apartment building’s heat crapped out on them all the time in the winter.

With her headaches, she hardly wanted to move. She just wanted to lie very still and try to block out the whispering.

She saw plenty of things in her dreams when she closed her eyes. Forests, houses, people, gore, grass, hands. It was a mess of random imagery and sounds and things that she couldn’t always piece together. She got up after a few days to throw up again, even though she doubted there was anything else in her stomach to throw up.

“Black vomit could be dried blood, you know,” Josh said, when he came to sit on the bed next to her. “You could have some internal bleeding.”

“Good. Maybe I’ll bleed to death.”

Josh didn’t like that thought. “I think we should call Dr. Niterus.”

“I think we shouldn’t,” Dalia groaned. “I don’t want to go back to the – ”

“Maybe he’ll come see you here,” Josh suggested. “Would you be okay if Dr. Niterus came here to see you? Would that bother you as much?”

Dalia took a second to think about it. That wasn’t the worst option she had ever heard. It sounded much more reasonable. “Okay. Call him. But I’m not going anywhere. If you can get a professional doctor to come see me at my shitty apartment, in the middle of the day, then I will see him and I won’t even complain.”

Often, when Dalia was being bitter and sarcastic, she was making him look stupid. This time, he would get to do the same thing to her. This time, he knew he was right. He smiled smugly to himself and wandered out of the bedroom to make the phone call that would give him his brief moment of victory.

Niterus agreed to come by, but not until later in the evening. He had a lot to do at the hospital. The pneumonia issue was spreading out of control and he was needed there.

Josh didn’t tell Dalia right away. He wanted to see the look on her face when Dr. Niterus showed up and she realized she had promised to something that would drive her crazy. It was almost as if the universe was finally throwing him a bone after he had endured years of Dalia making him look like an asshole.

Dalia stumbled out of bed an hour before Niterus was supposed to arrive – feeling even grumpier than she had before – and opened her laptop again. She felt like doing some research on concussions and whether or not hearing voices was a common thing in the aftermath of one. She didn’t want to be totally unprepared when Dr. Niterus showed up. She wanted to know how concerned she should be ahead of time.


	6. Wolves at the Door

In the middle of her internet browsing, a messenger screen popped up. She couldn’t remember who would have her screen name, but apparently someone did.

little_candles: Getting settled in?

ex0h: Already settled in. It’s been a while.

little_candles: Well, I’m glad you’re out of the hospital. It’s gotta be rough, having all those doctors to tell you what’s best for you.

ex0h: Yeah, I guess.

little_candles: How’s recovery?

ex0h: Not as bad as expected. Who is this, by the way? My memory’s still a little fuzzy.

little_candles: I know.

ex0h: Good to know. Who is this?

little_candles: You really don’t know?

ex0h: No, I don’t. I got my head slammed through a windshield. I don’t remember all of the people I may have talked to at some point.

little_candles: Not even people as important as me?

ex0h: I might remember if you would give me a name.

little_candles: You have a name. Now try remembering mine.

ex0h: Are you fucking with me? I just said I can’t. I’m so sorry that a crazy woman decided to try to fucking kill me, and I ended up a motherfucking invalid. But I need your fucking help here if you want me to remember you.

little_candles: *sigh* Really, Dalia?

ex0h: Yes. Fucking really.

little_candles: Do you want a hint?

ex0h: No. I changed my mind. I want you to go fuck yourself. I don’t care about anyone enough to put up with this shit.

little_candles: You care about me. Don’t pretend.

ex0h: I’m not. You are so insignificant to me, that I don’t even care enough to try to remember something as simple as your name.

little_candles: Oh, come on, baby. Don’t be that way.

ex0h: Don’t call me baby. Fuck you.

little_candles: You wish.

ex0h: Goodbye.

little_candles: Bye, baby. I’ll be thinking of you.

ex0h: Fuck you.

Dalia shut her laptop quickly and sat it on the table, away from her. She wasn’t up to dealing with whatever crazy person decided to fuck with her today.

She stretched out on the couch and covered herself in the blankets that Josh had used to assemble a makeshift bed on her couch. Her head was killing her again. Staring at her laptop screen had not been as helpful as one would have thought. She couldn’t say she was all that surprised.

“What was that about?” Josh asked from his place at the kitchen table.

“Nothing,” Dalia muttered. “Just some asshole friend or whatever of mine, getting all pissy that I didn’t automatically remember them. Just stupid shit. Doesn’t matter.”

“Okay. Well, Dr. Niterus will be here soon. So, rest up.”

Dalia groaned. “I don’t know how you got him to come out here.”

“I promised him my firstborn child,” Josh explained. “And then offered him various sexual favors. It was tough, so you need to be ready to wake up and talk to him when he gets here, okay?”

“Okay,” Dalia grinned. “Whatever. I’ll be ready to talk to the doctor so you won’t have to get fucked and have nothing to show for it. Promise.” She wasn’t sure how sincere she was, but she responded the way she was supposed to before she fell asleep.

Dr. Niterus showed up close to eight. He had changed out of his scrubs and was dressed completely in black. He seemed just as chipper as ever.

“Where is my patient?” Dr. Niterus asked cheerfully, when Josh answered the door.

“Over here on the couch.” Josh ushered her in and pointed Dr. Niterus over to the couch. “She hears voices when she tries to sleep, lately, Doctor. She thinks it might have something to do with her head injury.”

“Is that what she thinks?” Dr. Niterus frowned. “That’s all this is making her think of?”

Josh nodded. “Nothing’s changed. She still can’t remember much of anything major. She has no idea what’s going on a lot of the time.”

Dr. Niterus looked disappointed for once, instead of painfully bright. “I told you this would happen, didn’t I?”

“But what was I supposed to do?” Josh demanded. He was struck again by the unfairness of the whole situation. How was he supposed to handle all of this? How was he expected to protect her? “I’m powerless. I need help, but Master apparently isn’t going to help us until I’ve gotten Dalia back to him.”

“If he thought you could do it, he clearly trusts you,” Niterus reminded him. “So find a way.”

Josh had long since begun to doubt that his master did have any confidence in him. He suspected that he was just being punished. Master would eventually get what he wanted, but first he would watch Josh flounder, even if it came at the expense of one of their lives. No skin off his back. They could be replaced.

“I’m trying to find a way,” Josh said. “I called you because I saw that as a way. There’s no one else to help us.”

“Poor things,” Niterus cooed. His kind smile was replaced by a mockery of itself. “Wolves at every door and window, and allies you only need half a hand to count.”

Josh didn’t find this all as amusing as Dr. Niterus seemed to.

“You need me to wake her up?” Josh asked. “Or do you want to?”

Dr. Niterus walked past him and shook Dalia’s shoulder gently. “Dalia. You have an appointment today.”

It took a few seconds for her to get herself awake, and she realized that she didn’t feel as bad as she had every other time she woke up. There was a stark silence in the room. Her head was still throbbing, but it wasn’t as bad as it usually was.

She sat up carefully and began answering Dr. Niterus’ questions. They were about the same as Josh’s, but somehow they sounded less annoying coming from the good doctor.

“It’s possible that you’re still seeing some lingering effects from our concussion,” Dr. Niterus admitted. “I doubt it’s anything serious though. It’ll most likely clear up on its own. You’re under a lot of stress. Your body’s trying to tell you that it needs some rest, and your mind needs some more recovery time before you strain it too much.”

Dalia didn’t think she had been straining it all that much, but maybe she was supposed to be totally removed from higher-level thoughts for a few weeks? She wasn’t thrilled by his diagnosis, but she had seen it coming. She resented Josh even more now for wasting her time on this.

“She’s been throwing up something black,” Josh felt the need to point out. Dalia had forgotten all about that, but of course Josh remembered. “Could that be something serious?”

“That could be a sign of bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract.” It probably should have been mentioned sooner, judging by the look on Dr. Niterus’ face. “I’d consider that serious. Have you experienced any weakness or shortness of breath? Fatigue?”

“I’m not really tired. I just sleep a lot because my headaches have been so bad. I’m not feeling weaker though, and my breathing’s just fine.”

“Bloody stool?”

“Nope.”

“How often are you throwing up blood?”

“It happened once, a week ago, after I had been throwing up for a while,” Dalia explained. “It’s probably just because I’d thrown up so much before that.”

“Possible,” Dr. Niterus agreed. “Did the black vomit look like coffee grounds?”

“Nope.” Dalia shook her head. “It was definitely smooth and greasy-looking.”

“That might not have been blood then.” Dr. Niterus wasn’t sure if it was a relief for her or not. “Or at least not dried blood from your GI tract. It could have been fresher. So maybe you did just strain your throat or stomach from the vomiting. I wouldn’t be too worried about it unless it happens again.”

“I wasn’t that worried,” Dalia assured him. “I’m fine. Josh is the one who’s worried. I think he may be a hypochondriac. Can we maybe check that out?”

Dr. Niterus offered a weak laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Niterus sent her off to her room. Dalia resented being ordered around and treated like a baby, but she didn’t argue because she wouldn’t have to deal with him much longer tonight.

Once Dalia was in her room, with the door shut tight, Niterus began wandering around the apartment, trying to see if anything might have been out of place. He went to one of the windows first, then the next.

“There are scratches on the windows,” Dr. Niterus informed Josh quietly. “Did you notice that?”  
Josh nodded. He had been hoping his eyes were playing tricks on him.

“The Whisperer’s attention won’t be easy to escape,” Dr. Niterus said. “And he’ll be the most dangerous to her if she doesn’t get any better. If she starts to get violent, call me immediately.”  
Josh felt a sinking in his gut. “How fast could that happen?”

“It’ll be slow. It could take a few days, or up to a week since she’s not afraid. She’s not listening like she should. It’ll take a while and it should be difficult. I’m not as worried right now.”

“Is there anything you can do to help her?”

Dr. Niterus shook his head. “I can be here, but it’s not as safe for her here as it was in the hospital. Maybe we could make it clear to anyone coming for her that she’s been claimed, even if she doesn’t remember it right now.”

“How?” This was an overly simple plan that hardly seemed like a plan at all. It was just a suggestion that wouldn’t get them anywhere. “You want to mark the door or something?”

“It’s a thought.”

That much, Josh could not argue with. “I doubt the landlord would appreciate that. And wouldn’t some people take it as a challenge?”

“Yes. But that’s better than them thinking that they don’t have to work at all. It’s up to you.”

There wasn’t much else that Josh could think of though, so he snuck out in the middle of that night with a marker and made the ex-oh sign over the door.

Of course it would be suspicious to everyone who noticed it. Of course it would be confusing. Of course they would wonder what it meant. Hopefully, some of them would understand and think twice about wanting to get into the apartment.

Besides, it would be yet another reminder for her. She needed all the reminders she could get.

“What the fuck did you do?” Dalia demanded. She had just left the room to go out on a daily walk, but she immediately stormed back in.

Josh raised his head off of the couch. “What do you mean?” His brain was fuzzy enough from sleep that he wasn’t even really playing dumb yet.

“What do I mean?” Her voice had grown shrill and there was a burning anger in her eyes. “I mean the fucking door. Why did you draw on my fucking door? Are you four fucking years old?”

Then he remembered what he had done the night before. He had forgotten that he would have to explain this to her in the morning. Or maybe he wouldn’t. “Dr. Niterus might have done it. I don’t know. Why? What is it?”

“I don’t know. Some nonsense scribbles like my tattoo. And you expect me to believe you didn’t do it?”

Josh shrugged. “You can believe whatever you want. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  
Dalia didn’t believe him for a second. She had to know what he was up to. “What is it? What is the joke? What does it even fucking mean?”

“What does what mean?” Josh was waking up, but he still wasn’t coherent enough to be having this conversation.

“Whatever that shit you drew on my door is.” She was yelling now, disregarding the neighbors who might still be asleep. “What does it mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he snapped. He was getting irritable. “Literally nothing, okay? But apparently Niterus thought it meant something if he decided to put it there. Call him if you have a problem.”

“I’m gonna have to explain that shit to the landlord,” she shouted. “Do you understand that?”

“That sucks, but I didn’t fucking do it,” he argued. “Call Niterus if you have a problem.”

Dalia stormed back out and slammed the door behind her. She had places to be. She didn’t feel like putting up with this shit today.

On her way out of the building, she saw the first corpse. It was a cat, she thought. It had been a cat at one point. Now it was just a shredded mess. It was in a hallway of a floor below Dalia’s. She stared at it for a while, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. It didn’t upset her all that much, but it wasn’t something she had expected to see.

Someone else would find it. She turned away and continued down the stairs.


	7. Little Boy Blue and the Shadow

Dr. Niterus’ visit granted Dalia some peace. There was some quiet in the apartment and Dalia started to feel better, although still weak. She started to wander around the building and take walks around the block again, but she had to bundle up because it was getting too cold now. It was a bad time of year for walks.

Dalia was used to the cold. She was the kind of person who used to like to get out at night, when it was coldest. All of her clothes were black and heavy. Other than having to worry about cars seeing her, she was set. Lately, she was going out in the daytime though.

She walked the streets with her jacket wrapped around her tightly and her hood pulled up around her face. She kept her face to the sidewalk and didn’t talk to anyone or look at anyone she didn’t absolutely have to. She didn’t want to deal with anyone. She only left the house because she was restless and angry when she was cooped up in her apartment.

She didn’t know any of the neighbors in her building. She had never bothered with any of them. She mostly just saw them as a waste of her time. So she didn’t recognize any of the people she passed in the halls from time to time. They didn’t seem to recognize her either.

In the few days after the house visit with the doctor, she had noticed the eight or nine year old whose parents had apparently decided it was okay for him to just around in the hallway at all hours of the day and night. Dalia suspected that a woman with maternal instincts would be concerned about him, but she was just annoyed with his constant presence.

She was stepping over his gangly legs – which he had no qualms about spreading out in front of him in a thin hallway – when he decided that he needed to talk to her.

“How long have you lived here?” the boy asked her, in a voice that seemed too old for him.

Dalia was a little taken back by the way he sounded, but she shook it off quickly. “Longer than you’ve been alive.”

His giggle was actually almost childlike. “You don’t know how long I’ve been alive.”

“I’m a good guesser.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” he said.

“I’m a night owl,” she explained. “I used to be home asleep during the day.”

“Why?”

This was what she had always hated about children. They could make anything into a question. “Because I’m a monster. We like the dark.”

The boy smiled. “What kind of monster?” He sounded cautiously skeptical.

“The kind who feeds on the souls of children.” She didn’t have much trouble keeping a straight face. “All the kids who go missing around here? That was probably me.”

He still didn’t look convinced enough to be uncomfortable with what she was telling him. “Why would you do that?”

“Because they’re delicious. Duh.”

He giggled again. It wasn’t that funny, as far as she was concerned, but apparently she was an unintentional comedian.

“You’re a weird lady,” the boy told her.

“Yep.” Dalia took her house keys out of her pocket and unlocked her door. She was glad that Josh wasn’t home to have secured the door against her. It would have pissed her off if she had been stuck out in the hallway with this kid until Josh showed up.

It was almost as cold in the apartment as it was outside, so Dalia didn’t take any of her layers off. She put water in a tea kettle for tea and opened Pandora on her laptop. Little_candles sent her more than one message, but she ignored them and then made sure she had signed out of messenger before the constant notifications got more annoying.

She had finished pouring water for her mint tea when she heard the sound in her room. It was a muffled thud, like something had fallen to the floor. She froze with her tea kettle in hand and turned her attention to the closed door of her room.

Moving with as much silence and stealth that she could muster, she tiptoed to the hallway. She still had the kettle half full of boiling water, and that seemed like a good weapon to have if something other than a draft was moving things around in her room.

Since her door wasn’t pulled shut all the way, she figured she would just push it opened with her foot.

She had hoped she wouldn’t hear anything else coming from her room so she could convince herself that she was just hearing the normal sounds of a building filled with people, but she heard a rustling the closer she got to the door. There was something moving behind her door, and she was sure of it.

There was too much adrenaline and too much rage coursing through her for her to be afraid. She felt too much of the desire to protect herself and her home to allow herself to feel violated or intimidated by the invasion of her home.

Dalia kicked the door opened and tried to focus into the dark.

Part of her mind was still sure that she had just been stressing herself out over nothing, but her eyes caught the movement of a shape in the dark. It was a pale form that she thought looked like a person, but she could hardly see a thing. It turned towards her, and she knew she was looking at its face because she saw what she immediately knew were eyes. Huge, milky white eyes. It made a movement towards her and she threw the water forwards, watching the steaming liquid make contact with it.

The scream was ear-splitting. It was shrill and echoed through the small room. But it stopped coming towards her. Instead, it turned and jumped back through the now-opened window.

For a long time, she stood in the doorway – stiff and still – and stared out the window where the thing had escaped. The room was dead silent again and all she could hear was her heart pounding in her ears.

Her hands were shaking as she flipped the light switch on. The room wasn’t in order. She had thought maybe there wouldn’t be evidence of anything, other than what she saw, but the room looked like it had been torn apart. There were feathers everywhere from where the mattress had been torn open and her books and clothes were all over the floor. The place was a mess. Something had happened here and she had no idea how to explain it.

But there was nothing that could be done about it, so Dalia closed her window and shut the door to her room. She couldn’t look at it at the moment. Her mind was still having trouble processing what had just happened.

There was a knock on the door. She thought that she would ignore it at first, but the knocking got louder and more frantic so she went to the peephole to see who was outside.

“This isn’t a good time,” Dalia called out. “Can you come back later?”

The man on the other side of the door looked annoyed. “Look, I just came to see if you were okay. I live downstairs and I heard someone scream.”

“Everything’s fine,” Dalia assured him. “Really. I just spilled my tea on myself, but I’m okay. Just a few burns.”

He looked uncertain. “You want me to call you an ambulance? Is it bad?”

“Not that bad,” Dalia insisted. “Really. It’s nothing. I’m just putting ice on them and then I’ll be fine. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

He wandered away after standing idly by for a few seconds. She could tell he was reluctant to leave since he had gotten in his head that something fishy was going on with her. When he was finally gone, she went back to her kitchen table and put a mint teabag into the one cup of boiled water she had managed to pour into a cup before she had to use the rest for self-defense.

Eric Satie was playing in the background. It was “Gnossienne No. 1” and she knew she loved it, but she was having trouble focusing on it. There were bigger things on her mind that she also couldn’t bring her shocked brain to focus on.

She wondered if she might have seen the thing that had killed the cat she saw the other day.

Dalia took a drink of the tea and then rested her head on the kitchen table. There was too much going on tonight.

Josh returned home almost an hour after Dalia’s run-in with the thing in her room. The person, she corrected. It had been a person. That much she had convinced herself of now that she was safe.

“Someone was here,” Dalia told Josh in a voice that sounded too hollow, even for her.

Josh hung up his jacket and gave her a questioning look. “What do you mean? Who was here?”

Dalia didn’t look at him. Her eyes were trained on her cooling tea. “Someone was in my room. I don’t know who.”

“Are you okay?” He wasn’t sure what else to say to her. The fear struck him full-on suddenly, as did the realization that there was no more distant threat. It had become more real and urgent now.

“I’m fine. He never touched me,” she explained. “I didn’t even see him that well. It was dark.”

Josh went to her room to see if there was any evidence of the stranger. He hadn’t expected the kind of damage he found. “What the fuck? He shredded your bed?”

“Clearly.”

Josh leaned against the doorframe and tried to focus on what was going to happen to them now. First, he needed to figure out how they were going to clean up the mess of Dalia’s room.

“Have you thought about calling the police?” Josh asked. “I mean, stupid question, but someone did break into your room and fuck it up. Do you have insurance on any of this?”

“I think I had to get renter’s insurance to move in here. I don’t know how much it’ll cover though.”

“Call your insurance people and the police and let’s get this taken care of.” It was time to try to be practical. There would be plenty of time later to be scared by the millions of impractical things coming their way.

Dalia called a few numbers and sat up for a while, dealing with police reports. She couldn’t tell them anything about the person who had broken in, or how he had gotten in. They tried to fingerprint her window and look around the fire escape. They took note of the damage to her room and asked her about anyone who might have a problem with her, since nothing was taken and her room was the only one that had been disturbed.

When the night was over though, Dalia was exhausted and ready to try to sleep. She had made herself a bed on the floor with her surplus of blankets and the pillow that wasn’t destroyed.

The lock on her window wasn’t broken. She had to wonder if maybe she had forgotten to lock it when she left. She made sure it was locked tonight, and then she made sure her candles – the ones that hadn’t been broken – were lined along the window sill. Maybe Josh had had a good idea with the glass thing.

Dalia wondered what was wrong with her while she tried to sleep that night. Every time she turned around, something bizarre was happening, or something that was genuinely dangerous. There was always something going horribly wrong, and she never could feel too bad about it. She was hardly ever got excited other anything. At least when she had seen the man in her room, she had felt something close to fear. Her heart had been pounding and her mouth had been dry, but she still hadn't felt nearly as afraid as she thought she should be.

Something had gone wrong in her head at some point. She had lost some important part of herself, and that was the part of her that could be afraid or lost, or could feel like a normal person. It worried her how little all of the things that had happened to her worried her.

In her nightmares, she was more focused on the kinds of things she had told the little boy in the hallway. She dreamed about children, stolen away, and parents left mourning. Like everything in her real life, none of this seemed that unsettling to Dream Dalia. This was just something she was doing, and there was nothing odd about it.

She heard the whispers again and she couldn’t help but notice that her dream took darker and darker twists as the night went on. Other people had voices, but other people were still like props on the sidelines. This was about her. This dream was hers.

She woke up a few times throughout the night, staring at a wall or the ceiling. She wasn’t scared, per se, but she woke up startled and confused. She woke up unsure what was supposed to be going on and then drifted back off quickly. The night was long and went on forever, and it felt like she never got more than a few minutes of sleep.

At six, she finally gave up on trying to sleep and turned her focus instead on making coffee and reading. She did recognize a lot of the poems in some of her most worn-looking titles. Fragments of some of them came to mind while she was doing basic things around her apartment.

The apartment didn’t feel as safe as it had before the break-in. She still couldn’t bring herself to feel as scared as she probably should have, but she figured she would be cautious and go through the motions of fear. Maybe she would feel more of it soon.

Josh was asleep on the couch still. She suspected that he would be making up for all of the sleep he hadn’t gotten during the nights, so she took her coffee and her laptop to her bedroom. She shut her door and turned her lights on. Sometimes she wished there was more illumination in the small room.

There were three missed messages from little_candles. She was going to delete them, but she figured she might as well read them first.

little_candles: Are you ignoring me?

little_candles: Hello? Do you really think I’m just gonna disappear because you ignore me?

little_candles: Are you okay? I heard you had a visitor last night?

The second she saw the third message, Dalia’s heart skipped a beat. At first she thought she might be nervous, but then she realized it was rage. She hated giving in and dropping the plan to avoid her, but Dalia finally had to find out what was going on here.

ex0h: Okay, bitch. I’m listening. What the fuck do you want? And how did you know about the break-in?

little_candles: Heard it through the grapevine.

ex0h: What fucking grapevine?

little_candles: It’s an expression.

ex0h: I know that it’s an expression. Who’s the grapevine?

little_candles: If you don’t remember, then I guess it doesn’t matter. But I heard that you got a visitor, and I wanted to check up on you.

ex0h: I’m alive. And I’m pissed. Who was that?

little_candles: I don’t know their names. I’m not sure if any of them have names anymore. But I know that they want your attention. And, now that they’ve got it, I doubt they’ll be leaving you around anytime soon.

This wasn’t going like she had hoped. She had thought that there would be some information here that wouldn’t be totally pointless. She hoped that the crazy bitch could tell her why any of this was happening to her.

ex0h: So, what am I supposed to do about this?

little_candles: I’m not sure there’s anything you can do, if we’re gonna be honest. You’re pretty helpless on your own. If you had some help though, you might have a better chance.

Was everything the stupid candle girl did just a cry for Dalia’s attention? Was that really it? “Oh, of course I can help you. You need me. Let’s be friends.” It was almost sad.

ex0h: Help from who? From you?

little_candles: In a way, yes. I’m not that impressive by myself, but I have a lot of friends in high places. We could keep you safe.

ex0h: That doesn’t at all sound like a shady request. I’m sure you and your higher-up friends want nothing more than to help me keep myself safe from a nondescript threat that you don’t seem to have any specific information on. There is literally no way that this could go wrong for me. You know, I may have had a brain injury that literally had me spend a month learning how to do things a goddamn baby knows how to do, but that doesn’t mean I was actually born yesterday. You realize that, right?

little_candles: Wow, you’re really suspicious. I’m offering to help you, and you’re spending all your time analyzing and questioning my motives. You don’t have a lot of friends, do you?

ex0h: I don’t need friends. But I do need you to tell me what’s going on and what I’m supposed to be afraid of.

little_candles: I can’t explain what it is you need to be afraid of. That would take too much time. And you don’t have a lot of time, sorry to say. So, do you want our help or not?

ex0h: . . . Wow. All of my options sound so amazing. How will I ever choose?

little_candles: Jesus, the jokes never stop with you, do they? A little of your help for a little of ours. That’s all we want.

ex0h: And what does “help” translate to here?

little_candles: It translates to whatever we need. Nothing weirder than what you’re doing now.

It would have been helpful if Josh had explained what she did for a living with something better than “odd jobs.” That was apparently one of the things she would have to remember on her own. Because no one in the world could just make one thing easy for her.

ex0h: If it’s the same kind of thing I’m doing now, why would I want to do that exact same thing where I am? You suck at business propositions. There are no perks in that for me.

little_candles: Nope. No perks at all. Just your safety.

ex0h: Somehow, I think I can take care of myself. I took care of myself the other night.

little_candles: TMI.

ex0h: Haha. I get it now. You’re, like, twelve. You know what I mean.

little_candles: Yeah. That you’re boring. I don’t think you realize how much danger you’re in. You managed to get out of last night fine. You think that means that you can handle anything? You have no idea what’s coming for you. Now, do you want my help or not?

It didn’t take that much thinking.

ex0h: Not.

little_candles: Not? Great. That’s fantastic. Something tells me you’ll be changing your mind pretty soon. Because things are only gonna get worse from here.

Those parting words did not deserve a response.


	8. Allies and Enemies

“So, how much trouble do you think you’re gonna be in when you fail?” Brooke wanted to know. “I mean, since you started this off so well.”

So, she had wasted a day. That didn’t mean she was failing. She hadn’t lost all that much time.

Eliza couldn’t be too mad. She doubted that anything Brooke said was ever really meant to be cruel. She just failed at having conversations that weren’t bitter and snarky. It was one of those personality traits of hers that Eliza had just had to get used to when they had moved in together. 

“I’m not planning on failing,” Eliza explained. “I still have a lot of faith in my abilities.” 

“Hilarious.” Brooke was thinking only half-listening to the conversation that she had started. She was going through the kitchen and trying to figure out what she wanted to do about dinner. “Hey, when you’re not busy failing at winning over your mentally crippled target, do you think you could go to the store? I need hamburger meat.”

“Or,” Eliza suggested, “you could make something with what we have here so no one has to go to the store at this moment.

“You could go fuck yourself,” Brooke shrugged. “That’s a third option I could get behind. But you want food that we have here? That’s fine. We have ketchup and we have a couple microwave dinners that you bought because you hate good food, a couple pears, and more ketchup. That sound good to you?”

“The microwave dinners don’t sound bad.”

Brooke scowled and pointed to the door. “Store. Go to it. Now. Bring back nourishment.” 

Eliza groaned and shut her laptop. “Fine. Whatever. I’m taking the car and I’m going to the store. But I’m buying the worst meat I can and I’m going to make sure they bag it with dangerous chemicals. Just for you.”

Brooke flipped her off absently while she dug through the kitchen cabinets for her lighter. 

Eliza hadn’t thought she would be able to talk Brooke into letting her have the car, so she took it quickly and headed off to the store. 

She knew exactly where meat was, but she wandered around for a while. She felt like being difficult. 

It was late in the afternoon. It was already dark by this time of year. There weren’t a lot of people to get in her way. It was actually an easy trip. 

She didn’t have a ton of money on her, but she intended to do some personal shopping of her own. She needed to stock up on energy drinks, light bulbs, and Doritos. That was pretty much all she needed to get through another week. 

At the checkout line, she ended up behind an old woman with a million coupons. This only made her night better though. Now, she got to keep Brooke waiting even longer. 

“Everyone in my apartment building’s on edge,” the old lady was explaining to the cashier when Eliza got in line behind her. “Three pets died in the past couple days. And something attacked the lady that lives on the floor under me. Can you believe that?”

The cashier was trying to look interested, but she had already checked out for the night. “That’s awful. Any idea what it was?”

“The lady said she thought it was some man, but he bit her a few times. If that was the same thing that ate those animals, I don’t think it would have been a person.”

Eliza felt sick. That sounded too familiar to her, after what had apparently gone after Dalia. Maenads were bad enough when they had a purpose that they could remember, but they were terrifying after they had gone totally mad. That wasn’t something that she wanted running around the city while she had to live there. And if there was one going after Dalia and that had failed, there were bound to be more. A bunch of crazy fucking maenads was exactly what she needed to be worrying about this week. 

Because this week seemed to be going badly, Eliza wandered out of the line again and headed to the alcohol aisle, where she could buy herself a bottle of sangria. Drinking was the only thing that would make this horrible task before her enjoyable. Or, at least, bearable. She was glad she was finally able to buy it now, without Brooke’s help. 

When she got out of the car, she realized how nervous she was after the news that something she suspected was a maenad was roaming around town, on the prowl. Her pace got quicker and quicker the closer she got to the door, and she felt panic rising in her chest as she fought with her keys at the door. She slammed the door behind her and ran up the stairs, hoping no one saw her irrational behavior.

“You got my meat?” Brooke asked. She was sitting at the kitchen table when Eliza walked in. By the looks of the ash tray, she had burned through half a pack while she waited for her errand girl to return.

“Yeah.” Eliza sat the bag down on the table in front of Brooke. 

Brooke watched her suspiciously as she opened her wine and sat down on the couch. “Did you fuck up my car?”

Eliza was startled by the question. “What? No. Why?”

Brooke shrugged. “You look jumpy. Did something happen?”

“Nope.” 

Brooke didn’t feel all that convinced, but she didn’t care enough to press her for information. She went about making herself dinner while Eliza continued drinking wine out of the bottle and made herself a microwave dinner. 

Eliza tried watching television. Not the weird static channels that Brooke took too much amusement in watching, but actual television channels that could be found in the TV guide. She disliked most shows on television, but it was worth a shot.

In the end though, she caved in and turned to channel 125. The static gave way to images of more grotesque puppet shows. It was better than the silence.

 

Dalia lit the candles on her windowsill, in preparation for a long night. She had a lot of research to do, and she knew she had to get it done tonight. Things were getting ridiculous and she had to figure out what was going on.

Josh had finally been talked into spending the night at his place and giving. One thing she hadn’t forgotten was that she enjoyed being alone. It was peaceful. It was comforting. She didn’t have to worry about anyone else. 

This was her night to get things taken care of. The only question was where she was going to start. 

The first thing she did was look up news stories from the past couple days, to see if whoever had broken into her apartment had been found or had done anything else. She had expected not to find anything, since she suspected it had been directed at her, but she found a few weird attacks and more dead animals that had been torn up pretty bad. So, she read. 

There wasn’t a lot of information available. Just that it seemed to be a man, and that he was to be considered dangerous. The police wouldn’t comment. 

The great things about online news stories was that there was usually a comment section where people who knew nothing about the situation could argue with one another. 

A bunch of people talked about how worried they were about their animals and their neighborhoods. It was a while before someone started insisting that what they were looking for wasn’t a man. Or, at least, it wasn’t a man anymore. 

The comment section of one website was connected to Facebook. How much easier could stalking strangers get?

She got one of the men’s email address off of his Facebook page and sent him an email. She asked him what he had meant when he had said that what they were looking for wasn’t a man anymore. She hoped this wasn’t just a stupid thing about his lack of humanity for doing awful things, or something stupid like that. 

Next, she looked up Dr. Niterus on the hospital’s website. She tried finding some information about him from any other hospitals he had worked at, but not much seemed to come up. She found a list of places he had studied on the hospital website. Russia, France, Italy, England, China, a few places in Africa. He’d been everywhere she could think of in his earlier career. There wasn’t much about him in the states. She found one or two hospitals he had worked at. Two of the three she found that had employed someone by his name were closed now. It made sense, she suspected, since Mercy Hospital was a pit of contagion under his supervision. 

There wasn’t much else she could get on Niterus, so she figured it was time to move on while she waited for a response to the email she had sent. She wasn’t totally sure she would get a response, but she waited dutifully anyway. 

The next step in her plan was to contact little_candles herself and see if she could get something out of her (she was going to assume it was a woman she was dealing with, but she had to admit that she had no evidence of this). She was sick of being ambushed by her when she was vulnerable, and being bashed over the head with things she wasn’t sure how to deal with. This time, she would get what she needed out of a conversation with her mysterious stalker. 

ex0h: Hey, is your offer still good?

It took a few minutes for her to get a response. Her little friend had other things to do with her life. She probably did something with her life other than searching the news for stories of cat maulings and stalking people she didn’t know on the internet. 

little_candles: Which offer? You mean that incredibly generous one I made that you shot down without really thinking about it or hearing me out? That offer?

ex0h: Yes. That offer. Dumb question. 

little_candles: The offer is always good. At least while there’s still time. 

ex0h: Is there time? Or am I just wasting it with you?

little_candles: Of course there’s still time. What made you change your mind?

Something told Dalia that she would need to be a little less defensive (or just flat-out mean) to her new friend if she was going to get anywhere. She took a deep breath and forced herself to proceed calmly. 

ex0h: I’m getting a little nervous, to be honest. A lot of weird things have been happening to me, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. So I guess I’m out of options. 

little_candles: Wow. It’s so good to know that I am literally your last option in the world. 

ex0h: It should. You should feel blessed. So, do I get to know what I’m actually getting myself into now?

little_candles: What do you mean?

ex0h: Like who do you actually work for? What do I need to do? Why is any of this even happening?

little_candles: Oh. I guess those are pretty reasonable questions. And they’ll be explained. But not like this. We need to talk in person. 

This was much more than Dalia had hoped for. Now she would be able to actually see the person who was causing her so much confusion. 

ex0h: That’s fine. I can do that. When and where?

little_candles: When’s good for you?

ex0h: Anytime. Tonight, I don’t have a tag-along. 

little_candles: Great. How close are you to the convention center on Archel?

ex0h: Ten minutes.

little_candles: Meet me in the parking lot? We have quite a bit to discuss. 

All of the things wrong with this went through Dalia’s head, but she needed answers. Josh would try to stop her if he knew, so this was her night. This might be the best chance she had, and she wasn’t going to pass it up. 

ex0h: Sounds fine. 

Little_candles had signed out already though. This part of the conversation was over. 

Dalia took her Beretta Nano down to the car with her, to put in her glove compartment. She liked the thought of having an out. Her out was a little extreme but that had never bothered her in the past, if she recalled correctly. 

Before she left, she was careful to put out all of the candles. The thought of leaving candles unattended made her sick to her stomach. Probably the most normal feeling she had had in a long time.

This whole thing was stupid. It was probably dangerous and it might not teach her anything important. Still, it wasn’t like she had a lot of options. So she pushed aside all of her trepidations and began the drive to the event center, to her shady, parking lot meeting. 

The parking lot was as empty as she had expected it would be at this time of night. There were a few cars parked and empty, but there was one that came complete with the shadowy figure of a woman leaning back against the hood. 

Dalia pulled up next to her and observed her carefully, trying to determine the level of risk at the moment. 

The woman didn’t seem all that dangerous, but Dalia wasn’t stupid enough to think that dangerous people all looked a certain way. 

She was slimmer than Dalia – or, slimmer than Dalia had been before she spent a few weeks living on hospital food – but her hair was about the same color. She was younger than Dalia, but not by much. Her mouth was set into a scowl that looked like too much at home on her face. 

Dalia rolled the window down because the woman was gesturing for her to do so. 

“I didn’t know if you’d actually show up, Ms. Leer,” she said. “You must really been getting desperate. Did one of them eat your cat? Or is the whispering just getting to be too much?”

Dalia felt cold. “The whispering?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I know you’re hearing them. It’s to be expected. That’s why you’re here though, isn’t it?”

“Kind of,” Dalia admitted. “Yeah, I’ve been hearing them.”

“Okay, thank you,” she sighed. “That was all I wanted to know. Was that so hard?”

“No.”

“So, here we are, Ms. Leer,” the woman continued. “You have a problem and I think I can help you.”

Dalia turned off her car. 

“You’ve said that.” Dalia was less intimidated now and more annoyed with the woman’s condescending tone and her needless repetition. “You still haven’t explained how you’re going to help me though.”

The woman leaned against the side of the car, leaning in the window a little. “The Whisperer wants you, Ms. Leer. You’re hearing him because he wants you. That thing that broke into your house? He heard the whispering too. You wanna know what makes a man like that? Well, you hear it almost every night, in your dreams. Eventually, you’ll end up just like him, if someone doesn’t step in on your behalf.”

Dalia couldn’t say if she was ready to believe that just yet, but the thought unsettled her. It made about as much sense as anything else that had happened to her lately. “Who are you?”

The woman shrugged off the question. “Doesn’t matter who I am.”

“Still, I’d like to know.” 

The woman looked annoyed by this. Of course, Dalia wanted to ask stupid questions while something so important was going on. “Okay, whatever. Carsten. My last name is Carsten. I’m not in the phonebook. I don’t do social networking. You can remember the license plate of this car here, but it’s not mine. So, really, you haven’t learned anything important about me, have you? Can we continue?”

“Sure.”

Ms. Carsten was content with this response and continued. “If you want to be left alone, you’ll need to put something between you and the Whisperer. Because he won’t stop until he has to.”

“What are we putting between me and him?” The dark parking lot was feeling more and more menacing as this conversation went on. 

“Something stronger,” Ms. Carsten replied. “A proverbial splinter in his side, you know? The Puppeteer. The String-Mistress. The Cedar Queen. The Carved Empress. Any of this ringing any bells?”

Dalia shook her head. No. Not a word of this was making any sense to her. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“You will,” Ms. Carsten assured her. Dalia couldn’t be sure, but she thought Ms. Carsten looked relieved. “And I can take you to her. I can take you somewhere where you’ll be safe. But, first, you have to understand something.”

“What do I need to understand?” 

“That she can keep you safe, but it’s not for free,” Ms. Carsten explained. “She doesn’t step in to help random people. That’s a tremendous waste of her time. What would be the point of that?”

“There isn’t one,” Dalia guessed. 

Ms. Carsten attempted a smile, but it didn’t exactly look warm. “Good job, Ms. Leer. “So, she doesn’t just step up and give every random fucker a hand. But her servants? Those, she looks out for.”

The more this conversation went on, the less Dalia wanted to be here. This just wasn’t sounding like something that she wanted to be a part of. “Her servants?”

“Her servants,” Ms. Carsten repeated. “Her dolls. The Whisperer won’t interfere with them. No one will.”

"What kind of service are we talking?" Dalia wanted to know. "Because, I gotta tell you, this is all sounding pretty shady."

Ms. Carsten didn't seem all that worried with Dalia's concern. She paused her lecture to take her cigarettes out of her pocket and knock one of them out of the box and into her hand. She didn't pay much attention to Dalia, as she focused on lighting her cigarette. It was much more fascinating than the confused woman in the car, apparently. 

When she had gotten it lighted and taken a couple of drags - rudely blowing smoke into Dalia's car in the process - she finally started to pay attention to Dalia again. 

"Okay, well, I know that it sounds shady, okay?" Ms. Carsten met her eyes and she sounded genuinely amused. "I get it. But it's not like anything you're thinking. I know, because it's not really something that anyone would really, automatically think. 

The thing is, she's a busy . . ." Ms. Carsten trailed off, staring through Dalia. "Well, I'm not quite sure what she is. But she's busy, right? And, so, she needs people to keep her name out there."

"Why does her name need to be out there?"

"So no one forgets her," Ms. Carsten said. "There's power in knowing. She's powerful already, but someone knowing and fearing her? That makes her basically unstoppable. Get it?"

Of course not, but she wanted to. "Not really."

Ms. Carsten sighed heavily, breathing tendrils of smoke through the car window. "It's okay. It's not something a lot of people get automatically. It's a tough concept to wrap your mind around. You need to understand though, if you want to be safe."

"Okay."

"Alright." Ms. Carsten glanced around the empty parking lot. "Can we take a little drive? I have a lot to say and it's fucking cold out here."

Dalia didn't like the thought of the strange woman getting into her car. But what could she do? She was understanding so much now. She was getting there. She needed to keep this conversation going. And this was the only way she could think of now to do it. 

Dalia, after a moment of hesitation, hit the button to unlock the passenger door and let Ms. Carsten get inside. Her doubt was nagging at her, but she pushed it aside. There were more important things right now than her comfort or safety. 

"There are forces at work in the universe that are bigger than us, Ms. Leer," Ms. Carsten explained. "There are things in this world that you can't even imagine. And they are looking right at you. They're watching you and they're waiting for the moment to take you."

"Kind of like you're doing?" Dalia asked. "Kind of like your Cedar Queen is doing?"

Ms. Carsten chuckled. "Yeah, actually. Exactly like that. Do you wanna know the difference though?"  
"Well, of course," Dalia said. "That's why I'm here."

"The difference is that, if they get you, you'll end up like that thing that broke into your apartment. You'll end up a raving monster, just like them. The Cedar Queen doesn't want mindless monsters. She just wants people, with their ordinary personalities and lives. You still get to be a person. The same kind of person you are now, actually.”

“And you’re one of them?” Dalia felt she already knew the answer, but she wanted to hear it out loud.

“Yes.” Ms. Carsten smirked. It still looked unnatural on her face. “I’m one of them. I’m a . . . Well, a doll, for lack of a better word. I think that’s the accepted term at the moment.”

“And I could be too?”

“Indeed,” Ms. Carsten agreed. “Isn’t that a lovely thought? You could be like me, or you could be like the monster you saw. The choice is all up to you in the end. But you need to make one, before they make it for you.” 

It seemed like her choices were being made for her too much lately. She wondered why she wasn’t used to it by now. 

“Do I have any time to think about this?” Dalia wanted to know. “I don’t know if I can decide this all right now.”

Ms. Carsten looked defeated again. The triumph in her eyes was gone. “You don’t have a lot of time, if we’re being honest here, Ms. Leer. They’re already so close. You hear them, don’t you? You feel them? They’re so close. And you think the Whisperer is the only one you need to worry about? You’d be wrong there.”

“What else do I need to worry about?”

Ms. Carsten shrugged. “I don’t have time to name them all. But they’re gathering and they’re getting closer to you every day.”

“I still think I deserve a little bit of time to think,” Dalia insisted. “Not weeks or anything, but maybe a day or a few hours. This is a lot of information to take in at once. Can I get back to you?”

Ms. Carsten started to argue again, but she realized that she had lost this battle. But it was okay. She could still win the war. In fact, she probably would. Alright. I guess you know how to get a hold of me. Take me back to the parking lot then. Go home and think. Come back when you decide you need me.”

This was not an “if” statement. Dalia would get scared and she would come to them for help. 

 

“They don’t want to help you,” the little boy from earlier informed her, as she was unlocking her door.

Dalia yelped in surprise and turned to face him. She could’ve sworn the hall had been empty before. “Who?”

“The dolls you talked to,” he said. Once again, he sounded more like a small adult than a child. “They don’t want to help you. They say they can protect you, but they’re just as bad as what they’re saying they’ll protect you from.”

“You’re not eight, are you?” She was getting sick of things not being what they seemed. 

“Sort of.”

Dalia nodded. “Great. Well, how about you come inside? We’ll chart, we’ll have some tea, we’ll say a final farewell to my sanity. Sound good?”

The boy smiled and wandered inside the apartment with her. He looked so childish when he was excited. That made him even more unsettling to her. 

“Do you like tea?” Dalia asked. 

“What kind?” He was wandering her shoebox apartment, touching everything he could. This right here: this was what was wrong with kids. Or, rather, strange hall-dwelling beings who looked like kids. 

“Mint, lemon, black pearl. Stuff like that.”

“Black.”  
Of course. The little demon boy liked black tea. This all made perfect sense now. 

“So, what makes you different from the dolls?” All of this was crazy. The best thing to do was learn all that she could and try to break this down into something that made some sense. 

“I want to help you,” he said. “The rest of the things that want you don’t really care. They don’t want you specifically. They want another piece in their game, and you’re available right now.”

“There’s a game?” Because this wasn’t all insane enough on its own. “When did a game come onto all of this?”

“The game started too far back for anyone to remember,” he explained. “That’s not the important part though. The important part is what’s happening to you now. Now, you get to choose between being just a piece in the game and having some peace.”

Dalia had put the kettle on the stove and was watching the first tendrils of steam rise. “Peace?”  
“Exactly. Peace. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?”

Of course. Didn’t everyone want some peace? “I guess.” 

“And they won’t give you peace,” he said. He looked genuinely regretful. “They want a new pawn.”

“And you don’t want a pawn?” This wasn’t coming across as totally believable. “”Everyone else is horrible and they all want to use me, but not you.”

“I’m not playing.” His response was very simple; very nonchalant. “The game doesn’t mean anything to me. I just want to help you.”

“How?” Dalia demanded. 

“You’re lonely, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’re lost and alone in the world. No friends, no family, no one who really understands you. You’d hide in your own mind, but it lies to you too these days, doesn’t it?”

Dalia wanted to interrupt, but all she could do was listen and wait patiently for the next words out of his mouth. She was so transfixed that the whistle of the tea kettle caused her to jump. 

She got up to start pouring the water and getting the teabags out of the cabinet. 

“Of course I’m lonely,” she told him, after she had poured heir mugs and sat them down on the table. “I don’t know what’s going on most of the time in my own life, and the only person who puts up with me is one of the most insufferable people on the planet. So, yeah, I’m not the happiest person on the planet.”

“Do you remember when you were happy?” he asked. 

“Yes,” Dalia admitted. This would be the first time she said this out loud, but it seemed fitting that she said it first to him. “When I was in my coma, I think I was happy.”

After two weeks, she had been awoken though, and had spent the next three months in hell. The first had been the worst. That was the month where she couldn’t communicate how she wanted, moving around was awful, she’d spent most of her time trying to regain the muscles required to wander out of her room.

But, during those two weeks, she had been at peace. She had been so calm and there had been no struggle in her life. Everything had been okay. 

“It’s always something like that,” he said. “With people like you, at least. It’s always something where you’re happy because you’re not in your life. I can give you that back.”

Dalia raised her eyebrows. “You can put me in a coma? How generous of you.”

“Not a coma, exactly,” he said. “Nothing like that. But I can take so much of your pain away. I can take your fear and your confusion. And your loneliness.”

“What does that leave me?” she wanted to know.

He had thought it was obvious. Hadn’t they discussed this already? “Peace.”

It seemed like that would get old after a while. She thought it sounded wonderful, but the smarter part of her brain reminded her that living just wasn’t the same without the negative emotions. “I don’t know if I could live like that forever.”

The boy smiled – not at all childish this time – and took a sip of his tea. “Think about it.”

“I will,” she assured him. “I will. I have a lot to think about.”


	9. Retreat

Brooke returned home in a foul mood. She stomped up the stairs and slammed the door so hard that the walls around it shook. 

Eliza awoke with a start at the sound. 

“Why are you sleeping on the couch?” Brooke demanded. 

Eliza rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and laid her head back down on the couch pillow. “What the fuck happened to you?”

“What the fuck happened to me?” Brooke repeated angrily. “I was this close to getting your little fucking friend, and then she decided she needed some time to think. Do you have any idea how that feels? To actually come close to succeeding and then realize that you’re going to return as big of a loser as your worthless roommate?

No, I guess you probably don’t know how that feels. Because you don’t live with a failure. But I bet you could empathize.”

The comment had gone over Eliza’s head at first, but it eventually dawned on her. “Wait, why were you talking to Dalia?”

“Because you weren’t here when she messaged you back, so I took the liberty of handling it for you,” Brooke explained, rather proud of herself. “I met up with her and we discussed her options. She doesn’t have a lot, which is the upside. But she needs some time to think over whether or not she would rather be a raving monster, so there you go.”

“I can’t believe you did that,” Eliza snapped. “You said you would let me handle this, and I was doing just fine. I’m the reason she contacted you in the first place. She showed up because I was winning her over. So where the fuck do you get off butting into my job?”

“Oh, shut up,” Brooke ordered. “I don’t wanna deal with you right now. I already feel like shit. Go back to sleep or something.”

She wasn’t planning on letting this drop anytime soon. “No, seriously, Brooke. How often do I decide to take over your fucking job?”

Brooke sneered. “Eliza, for you to take my job, you would have to be ahead of me at some point. You would have to outdo me. That has yet to happen. And it never will.”

Brooke passed her by without another glance and wandered into the kitchen for a late dinner. She had no time for Eliza or her whining. 

It occurred to Eliza sometimes that Brooke and Dalia had a lot in common, as personalities went. They were both bitter and dismissive to Eliza, and they both thought too much of themselves. Maybe that was why Eliza had jumped at the opportunity to work and live with her though. Maybe that was why she was more than willing to put up with the mood swings and the verbal onslaughts. 

“Okay, well, just because she needs time to think doesn’t mean we don’t still have her,” Eliza insisted. 

“That’s what I thought too, at first,” Brooke admitted. “But then I realized that we don’t have any idea how much time we really have. We still have her interest, but we might not have the time it takes to get her before someone else does. I thought that I had won this one, but I’m starting to realize that this might have been more of a surrender.”

Eliza followed her roommate into the kitchen and sat down at the table, where she felt it would be harder for Brooke to ignore her completely. “It sounds like you did just fine. And she’s smart. Maybe she’ll come to her senses sooner than we think.”

“Yeah, we can hope,” Brooke agreed. “But since when has hope gotten anyone anywhere?”

Eliza took a moment to think about it. “Well, I honestly can’t think of a time.”

“That’s because it doesn’t happen,” Brooke snapped. “Just hoping something will happen has never actually caused it to happen. This is a rule of the universe. I’m sure you’ve heard it at some point.”

It was hard to try to celebrate a small victory when Brooke was around. 

“You probably should have gone, but you ruined the chance of that happening the first time you talked to her,” Brooke explained. “Because of the impression you made on her, she’d never be willing to trust you. That’s really too bad that you ruined what could have been your best job.”

It had been easy for Eliza to push that thought out of her mind at first, but that was becoming harder to do with Brooke reminding her of it. “I’m sorry about that. I don’t know what else to say.”

“Then don’t say anything else,” Brooke suggested. “Just don’t. Let’s forget about it. Did you accomplish anything tonight?”

“I took the trash out.” Eliza didn’t bother to hide the boredom in her tone. “I cleaned a couple cups. I watched an episode of that show where the ghost hunters go into houses and turn the lights out and jump at every noise.”

“I hate that show,” Brooke scowled. 

“Well, then, don’t watch it,” Eliza replied. “It was pretty entertaining. A lot of paranoid idiots. What’s more fun than that?” 

“Sticking needles through your fingertips?” Brooke guessed. 

“What a healthy, well-adjusted person you are.”

"I often impress myself with both of those things.”

Brooke was getting agitated again. She had managed to misplace the can opener, and was now left with the task of finding a better way to open her tuna. She tried hitting it on the sink a few times, like she thought she could break it open, but she just ended up chipping the sink and making Eliza cringe with the sounds it made. 

“What the fuck, Brooke?” Eliza demanded. “Are you trying to break everything?”

“No,” Brooke corrected. “I’m trying to get some goddamn tuna. Are you gonna help?”

Eliza couldn’t imagine anything she wanted more than to help Brooke break open cans in their kitchen. “Did you try knifing it?” 

“Hold on.” Brooke tried setting the can away from her and stabbing it with one of their kitchen knives, far enough that it wouldn’t cut her if it slipped. That dented it – as had the meeting with the kitchen sink – but still nothing. 

“This is insane,” Eliza commented. “Seriously. The can opener is somewhere in this kitchen. I’m sure it wouldn’t take that long to find it.”

“Well, find it then,” Brooke said. “Don’t just stand there and watch me trying not to stab myself.”

This was going to be a bad night. Eliza could already tell. Brooke wasn’t in one of her dull “fuck it” moods. She was in one of those furious moods that Eliza would have to deal with. She’d end up spending the night dodging her furious and randomly aggressive friend. 

Without complaining, Eliza began a search for the missing can opener. It wasn’t as hard to find as Eliza had suspected. She handed it over to Brooke and backed away quickly. 

She turned the TV onto one of Brooke’s channels and slunk into her room to hide. 

 

Josh came home oblivious to all of the changes that had taken place while he was gone. All he knew was that she was having a nightmare on the couch, from what he could tell. 

He went over to the couch and shook her gently. “Dal, wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”

She flinched when he touched her, but she was still asleep. He knelt down beside her and put a hand on her shoulder again. This time, she started awake, throwing a hand out in front of her and almost hitting him in the face. Josh started to fall backwards, but he caught himself on the table. 

“Shit, Dalia, are you okay?” he wanted to know. 

She was still staring at him with wide, frantic eyes. It took her a second to realize what she was staring at and calm down. “Oh. Sorry, Josh.”

She sat up and pulled her knees up to her chest. She took a few deep breaths and gave herself a second to recover. 

“How bad a dream were you having?” he asked as he was standing up and brushing himself off.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “There’s just a lot on my mind lately. My dreams have been pretty weird.”

It took her a second to comb through her memories to sort out what she had dreamt and what fucked up things had actually happened to her the night before. 

“A lot of things happened to me last night, Josh,” she informed him in her hollow morning voice. “I have a lot to think about.”

Josh wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he didn’t. 

Dalia got off of the couch and went to her room to find clothes. Her laptop was still opened on the bed – correction: her bare box spring – so she checked to see if she had gotten anything back from her random email buddy. 

Just as she had expected, nothing. 

At least she had gotten something out of her doll friend. At least she had gotten something from her stalker neighbor boy who said that he would be back. That was a million times more useful than anything her email pal could have told her.

“You’re not spending the night again tonight, right?” Dalia asked. “I kinda need the couch. You know, on account of how my bed got shredded.”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” he assured her. “I just thought I’d come over this morning to check in on you. I would have come earlier, but I got held up. I’m glad I did too, since you’re just now getting up.”

“Just now getting up?” she repeated. “What time is it?”

Before he could answer, she entered the kitchen to see the clock on the wall. It was just now noon. “Well, shit.”

“Why did you sleep so late?”

“I took a bunch of Nyquill last night,” Dalia explained. “I was having a lot of trouble sleeping and I needed to get some sleep, so I decided to drug myself.”

“You were having that much trouble sleeping?” He was concerned again, and she had only been up for a few minutes. 

“It’s been a rough night,” she repeated. “I had a lot to think about. And I kept having awful dreams every time I tried to sleep. So I went to the store and got myself some Nyquil.”

It seemed reasonable enough. Maybe not terribly safe, but not something he could fault her for. 

"What happened last night?” he decided he would take a chance and ask. He wasn’t sure he would get a real answer, but he figured he would try. 

“I met some people,” she informed him. “Some very interesting people.”

“Oh, really?” This was starting to sound bad. This was what he got for moving out. “Like who?”

“I think I’ll tell you later, when I understand it a little more,” she promised. “But right now you just have to trust me when I tell you that I think I’m figuring things out.”

Josh frowned. “Dalia, you need to be careful. You don’t know who you can trust.”

“I don’t trust anyone,” she said. “So that’s not really a problem.”

She didn’t think that she needed to say out loud that she didn’t totally trust Josh either. He surely understood this, and if he didn’t then he didn’t need to. She wasn’t going to dumb things down for the stupid. 

“Just be careful,” he repeated. “Don’t go to any strange places alone. Don’t tell strangers too much. Take care of yourself.”

“I’ll try,” she sighed. But she had the idea that he had a different idea of taking care of herself than she did. 

Dalia took a couple pills from her aspirin stash and washed it down with leftover tea. 

Josh noticed the two cups with tea bags resting in them, still sitting out on the table. He pointed to them. “You had someone in the apartment?”

“Just a neighbor boy,” Dalia shrugged. “He got locked out of his apartment and so he had some tea while we waited for his parents.”

Josh shook his head almost immediately. “You hate kids.”

“Well, yeah, but not enough to leave them sitting out by themselves at night,” Dalia shrugged. “I’m not that heartless.”

“You are, actually,” he argued. “You’re like the Grinch. You were born with a heart two sizes too small. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you willingly help another human being with no ulterior motive.”

“Well, that can’t be true.” These were empty words though, because she had no choice but to believe this analysis of herself. That was the impression she had gotten too. “I think you’re thinking of some other ruthless friend you have.”

Josh didn’t know what was funnier: Dalia joking about being a good person, or the thought of Josh having another friend. 

“What was he like anyway?” Josh asked with feigned casualness. “The kid.”

“Like a kid,” Dalia lied. “He was just a little kid who had gotten locked out. Nothing special. I don’t even remember his name.” 

Dalia shrugged him off and talked him into leaving her alone. She sent him on his way and tried to go on with her day like everything was normal. 

As relieved as she was to have Josh out of her hair, her relief didn’t last long. The day went on and she gradually started to feel sicker. At first, she thought it was just a headache from not eating that day, but it became obvious that something else was wrong with her. It felt too familiar. 

The sickness had come back to her, and it was picking up right where it had left off. She was throwing up within three hours of the headaches starting and was bedridden again by the end of the day. She thought she had finally gotten rid of Josh but now she wouldn’t be able to avoid him. 

He put a foam square down on her box spring and put clean sheets over it so she could have a useable bed again. He made her food and kept her hydrated. He called Dr. Niterus when he could.   
“I think I’m dying,” Dalia announced groggily. 

“No, you’re not,” Josh argued. “All I can do is sleep and puke. I’m as good as dead. Go on without me. The youngins need you.” 

Josh gave up arguing and trying to interpret her fevered ramblings. She was either incredibly dedicated to the bizarre running jokes about wagon trains that had popped into her head a while ago, or she had become completely delusional. 

“Dr. Niterus sent over something for your headache,” he said. “Do you wanna take one before I go?”

"Where?” As if she wasn’t simple excited that he was going away. “Are you taking my advice and taking the little ones on West?”

“What are you even talking about?”

“You’ll have to lead the party now, Josh,” she continued. “Take over for me. You can do it. You’re stronger than I gave you credit for when you couldn’t put that ox with the broken leg down.”

“Do you want a pill or not?” he snapped. “I’m leaving.”

“Just one,” Dalia conceded. “To dull the pain of my last moments.”

Dalia swallowed a white pill and buried her head under her pillow as soon as Josh had left. The light was painful. She wasn’t sure if the pill was actually relieving any pain. Fucking Niterus. So, instead of hoping for some relief so she could get up and move around, she focused all of her energy on falling asleep. She was much more successful that that part. 

No dreams. A combination of the migraine and the pain meds knocked her out cold. Just silence. It was like she might already be dead. It was like being back in her coma. It was peace. 

She wasn’t sure why she woke up, when it was so wonderful not to. She thought maybe it was because she was cold. It was colder in the room, and she began to wonder if Josh had left the window opened when he left. But at least her head felt better. It was fuzzy, but it wasn’t bad. 

“They’re all like this,” a familiar and quiet voice informed her from the shadows. “They’ll hurt you to get what they want. The Whisperer knows he’s making you sick, but that won’t stop him.” 

Dalia’s eyes wandered the room for the little boy from the night before. Finally, she found him in the corner closest to the door. “Who let you in?”

“I let myself in,” he said. “I’m sure you have no use for people. Left to your own devices, you’d hide away from the world. You’d be just who you used to be.”

“Good.” 

“But back when you were that girl, you wanted to be the one you are now.” 

That was the part she would have left out of that memory. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“It was, actually,” he said. “You were miserable. You were scared of the world. And you desperately wanted a friend. But you have no idea how to be a friend. You have no idea how to have one. So you convinced yourself to hate everyone, because it’s easier than being lonely or being sad that no one can stand you for very long. Josh wants so badly to be your friend. He’s done so much for you, but you can’t even treat him like someone you want to be around.”

“He’s annoying,” Dalia defended. 

“And Eliza’s the only person who honestly understands you, but you’re too smart to let yourself like her,” the boy continued. “You know that you might have to kill each other one day, so you never let yourself get along with her. So you could never really be happy, could you? You could never truly love someone. Or let someone love you.”

“I don’t need to,” she insisted. “I’m doing just fine.”

“You are, aren’t you?” He didn’t sound all that convinced. “You don’t need anyone. You don’t miss anyone. You’re happy to be shut up in a world where no one else will really understand you, except the one person you hate. That must be a wonderful life. I’m jealous.” 

“You should be,” she snapped. “I’m fine. My life is just fine.”

The little boy smiled that smile that was too old for his small, pale face. “My life has been lonely too,” he told her, disregarding her protests that her life was nothing like he thought. “I’ve only ever been alone. I try to make friends, but it never works out the way I want.” 

“Maybe because you’re really creepy,” Dalia suggested. “Do we have to do this now? My head really hurts.”

“Of course it does.” The little boy nodded sagely. “And it’s going to get worse. It can only get worse from here.”

“And there’s nothing I can do about it?”

“I could help you. The dolls could stop it, but they wouldn’t be helping you. You could try to run.”

“Where would I go? And how would that help?”

The little boy shrugged. “It never hurts to try. And you can at least get away from him for short periods of time. He can’t bother you constantly. You can get out of his range sometimes.”

“Wonderful.” All that meant was that she was going to have to spend her life running. That didn’t sound terrible at all. 

“I could still help you,” the little boy said. “It’s not too late. I could take this all away from you. You don’t have to go through this.”

“I’d rather handle this on my own,” Dalia said. “Really. I’m sick of all of you things trying to save me or use me as pawns or whatever the fuck it is you all want.”

The little boy walked over to the side of her bed and placed a small, cold man on her cheek. “Good luck, Dalia. I hope you’re not a shell the next time I see you.”

Dalia shrunk away and shut her eyes tightly. When she opened them again, she was alone in the room.

That was when the assault on her brain began to be unbearable again. 

She didn’t realize that the screams she heard were coming from her until her throat started to hurt.

Josh came home to neighbors and police crowding around his door. He let them in, assured them that nothing horrible was happening in the apartment, gave Dalia another of Dr. Niterus’ pills, and then began planning. He knew that there was nothing left to do. They had to leave. 

He started packing while she was asleep, stuffing her meager collection of clothes in a duffel bag and tried to get as many of her poetry books in as possible. 

Josh couldn’t think of what else to pack, so he started grabbing whatever he could. Her laptop, some chargers, her framed leaf, a blanket. He figured she would tell him more when she woke up, granted she was coherent. 

He went to the bank and withdrew as much as he could from his account. He wasn’t sure how money got there or how an amount was determined, but he knew something was taking care of him. He would take advantage of that during their escape. 

He hid the money in a zipper pouch and slid it to the bottom of the duffel bag. He was shaking the whole time. 

Every shadow felt like it was going to jump out at him. He felt like he was stepping over animal corpses left and right on his way to and from the apartment. He was beginning to think they wouldn’t make it out. 

The medication (mostly just a powerful sedative to begin with) wouldn’t leave her awake long enough to figure anything out. So he did the only other thing he could think of to do. He began dosing her with a bottle of scotch he found in the cabinet from the moment she stated stirring. He figured if she was too drunk to focus on anything, but still awake enough to help him, they would be able to get everything ready to go without her being in constant emotional and mental torment. 

It seemed like a good idea at first, but she drank more and more to try to get some peace, and eventually she was stumbling drunk. She had emptied the fairly large bottle and she was becoming more and more difficult to deal with. 

Drunk Dalia was only marginally more useful than sleeping Dalia. She slurred and stumbled around the apartment, knocking things over and threatening to break the bottle over Josh’s head every time he said anything that annoyed her. 

She was a mean drunk. He had totally forgotten that. How had he managed to forget something like that?

She managed to help get most everything they needed and she only broke one glass and a leg of a chair. She called him names pretty consistently the whole time, but he was good at ignoring those.

“You feeling okay?” he asked her periodically, even though he knew that the answer wouldn’t be something he wanted to hear. 

It was usually something along the lines of: “How about you pack the socks, you stupid piece of shit. This is why I can’t fucking stand you. I remember now. You’re a fucking whiny bitch. Fuck you. Put the fucking socks in the bag and – shit, who put this fucking chair here. And why won’t you all just fucking shut up!”

The last part, she was always screaming. It was always demanding that something or someone just shut up. She was lashing out at the voices now, instead of hiding her head under the pillow. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or if that was scarier. 

“We can go now, okay?” Josh finally announced. “We can get out of here. Can you get to the car?”

Josh tried to take her arm, but she smacked his hand away and reeled backwards, slamming into the doorframe. “Don’t fucking touch me. I can get to the car on my own. I’m a fucking adult.”

Josh doubted she could get there on her own without hurting herself, but he was afraid to touch her so he let her make her own way down the stairs on her wobbly legs. By some miracle, she got to the car without ever having fallen down the stairs. 

Josh helped her buckle into the passenger seat – earning him a slap in the process – and then he was more than ready to get on the road. 

They took Dalia’s car, because it was more reliable than Josh’s and it had more space in the back seats for their bags. They went by Josh’s house to get some of his things, but Dalia had passed out from the alcoholic rages before they got there. 

Josh had filled the gas tank before they set out, so they were going to hopefully be able to drive all night. Josh wanted to drive all night and sleep through the days. He felt safer sleeping during the day. 

He couldn’t make it all night though. He was exhausted beyond all hope after six hours and Dalia obviously couldn’t drive. So he made the frustrating decision to stop at their first hotel of the trip. He had hoped they wouldn’t have to spend money this fast. 

Josh managed to wake her up to get her to walk into the hotel room and collapse onto one of the beds. 

“Where are we going?” Dalia asked groggily. “Are we running away?”

“Yep,” he agreed. “We’re running away.”

“How are we supposed to run from voices?” she wanted to know. 

Josh swallowed the lump in his throat. “I don’t know. But we’re gonna put as much distance between us and them as we can.”

Dalia thought about asking more about the plan, but she was hardly in the mood to get too much into detail. She was just happy that her headache was subsiding finally. There was near silence in her head, and it was the most beautiful feeling. 

“Dalia?” josh whispered from his bed. He had meant to go straight to bed, but there was so much on his mind that needed to be said. 

“Joshua?”

“Don’t you remember?” He was aware that he was almost pleading now but this was not a time for him to be self-conscious. “How do you not remember your own life?”

The sudden passion in his voice caught her off guard. “No, Josh, I don’t remember. If I did, I think this would all be going a little different.”

“You have to remember, Dalia. You have to try. I can’t do much for us unless you remember.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“But you have to,” he snapped. “You really don’t understand. We’ll be so much safer if you stop being so fucking hopeless. This whole thing will be over if you can just remember.”

Dalia could feel the bile rising in her throat. “What?”

“They only want you because you’re clueless enough to be an easy target,” Josh explained. “This will all be over if you can just come back from wherever it is in your brain you’re hiding.” 

“This is my fault?” she asked. This was all too much for her in her fragile state. “That’s what you’re saying? This is all my fault because my memory’s fucked?”

As much as he hated to say it, “Yes.”

Never mind. He didn’t hate to say that. He had wanted to say something like that to her for a while. Because this whole mess was her fault. But that wasn’t something she could do anything about. It was horrible to make her feel awful when she was just as lost and confused as he was. No, more confused than he was because she didn’t remember the pieces that made all of this make sense. 

“I’m sorry,” he said after the tense silence that of course followed that horribly truthful comment. “I didn’t mean that. It’s not like you can help it.”

That wasn’t all that bad to hear from him. What was so upsetting was the fact that he had to be right. This was her fault. And it was all because of the weakness and everything she had lost. First, she had suffered something that set her back this far, and now that same thing was what was causing her to be the center of this supernatural mess. 

“I’m going to bed since I can right now,” she muttered. “I’ll talk to you in the morning. Or the night. Whatever. See you then.”

She still couldn’t sleep though, so she took one of Dr. Niterus’ pills that she had stashed away and knocked herself out. 

“You know,” she whispered to her sleeping friend, “I would have taken them anyway if you had just told me what they were.”

He did what he thought he had to though. And he had grown enough of a spine to lie to her and try to get something done. She felt a small stirring of pride for the first time. 

When she fell asleep, she was thankful that the medicine was still doing its job. No nightmares. 

 

Dalia woke up before Josh and it had been sunset for a few hours already. It was around eight. They had somehow managed to sleep through an entire day. This was what happened when they had been plagued by voices for days and nights. 

Instead of immediately stirring Josh, she took the opportunity to take a shower. She didn’t feel like she needed to be on her guard as much, and she was enjoying the relaxation that came with a shower that wasn’t laden with uncomfortable silence and the feeling of eyes boring into her back. 

She scrubbed herself as hard as she could with the soap, feeling like she needed to remove the stains of the past few months. And then she was ready to get on the road and put even more distance between them and whatever was following them. 

This time, Dalia had decided that she would drive. She hated letting anyone else drive her car and that included Josh. 

“So, no plan at all?” she asked after they stopped for dinner/breakfast. 

“Not a single one.”

“Well, that’s fantastic,” she yelled. “So, we’re just gonna drive for a while? Just keep going until we fall off of the world and into the ocean that is inevitably filled with monsters that we’ll see right before we literally fall off the edge of the world.” 

“I think it’s a better plan than the one you had,” he told her. “I think yours was pretty much lying around in bed and being sick until you went crazy and killed me and probably a bunch of your neighbors.”

“Whatever.”

“Well, what do you wanna do? “He was finally losing his temper tonight. It was beautiful.

“I think we need to stop for a little while and try to regroup,” she suggested. “Just driving nonstop is not a plan. That’s a good way to just eventually run out of money or something else. I don’t know, but it’s just not a good idea.” 

“Fine. So we’ll stop at a hotel or something and we’ll set up shop and we’ll wait.” 

Her logic might not have been the soundest, but it was the best they had come up with so far. It made more sense than just driving endlessly forever. It wasn’t plausible and it wouldn’t really get them anywhere. She just wanted to get to where she could think clearly so she could figure out how to fix this. 

She wasn’t sure how she had managed to cause all of this, but she was convinced she could fix it. 

 

Brooke was, as always, the first person to point out that Eliza had found a way to fail. She brought it up throughout the day while she smoked and lay around in front of the TV.

For someone who spent all of her time doing nothing, Brooke sure had a lot to say about other people not getting shit done.

“I don’t think she’s mad at you yet though,” Brooke informed her roommate in a tone that might have been trying to be hopeful. Maybe it was just supposed to be mockingly hopeful. “No awful puppet shows on the commercials today.”

“That’s a good sign,” Eliza grumbled. She sat down on the couch next to Brooke’s feet. Brooke moved them and tossed her legs over Eliza’s lap. “I think I’m gonna need to chase her down now. What do you think?”

“How are you planning on doing that?” Brooke demanded. “You don’t know where she is. You don’t even know where the fuck she’s heading.”

“I’ll find her.” Eliza was confident in this. “I have a feeling I’ll have some help.”

Brooke raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think she’s gonna help you find her? She’s just gonna be pissed that you couldn’t do it yourself.”

“I doubt that,” Eliza said. “Think about it. This shows that I’m somewhat proactive. It shows that I’m looking for her and I just need a little push in the right direction.”

“Okay, whatever,” Brooke sighed. “Try it.”

Eliza was never sure how she was supposed to get a hold of her mistress, but she always figured it out. This time she decided she would go with the TV since she seemed to love communicating through the TV.

She sat down in front of it and leaned her forehead against the screen. “I could really use a little help right now, you know.”

Brooke laughed. “You always pick the stupidest ways to do it.”

Eliza reached back and flipped Brooke off over her shoulder. 

The screen began fading in and out and the lines of static appeared across it from time to time. Eliza stayed quiet and still and didn’t see much of the screen, but a figure was gradually appearing. She was taking shape. 

She was shaped like a person, but her skin was glossy and her angles were too extreme. Everything about her body was too extreme. It didn’t curve or slope. She was the color of cedar and her eyes were black orbs in her neatly-carved face. 

“I’ve been wondering when you’d ask for help.” When she spoke, her mouth opened and shut randomly, following no real pattern or reason. “It’s been a while.”

“I’ve had it under control,” Eliza explained. 

“She hasn’t had anything under control,” Brooke said. “The closest we got was when I took things into my own hands.”

“Not true,” Eliza argued. “Everything’s going well. But, as you know, Dalia’s on the road. If you want me to follow her, it would be nice if I had a little help tracking her down.”

“All by yourself?” the Cedar Queen inquired. “You’re going out without your partner in crime?”

Brooke grinned. “I wouldn’t let her go anywhere without me.”

“I wasn’t planning on taking her,” Eliza sighed. “I think I can handle it by myself.”

“Why would you do that when you could have help?” If her face was capable of expressions, she might have smiled. 

“I guess I could bring her,” Eliza relented. “Could you let me know where she is now?”

“No.” The Cedar Queen shook her head and it looked like her head was being twisted violently from side to side. Eliza had no idea why she enjoyed doing that sometimes. The Queen of Threads could appear and move however she wanted. But sometimes she liked to look like some kind of grotesque puppet. It was unnerving. It made sense to people she wanted to intimidate, but it seemed like overkill to appear that way to her followers. “But I can show you where she’s going.”

Of course. She couldn’t give Eliza anything she actually wanted, but she could always go with the slightly more difficult option, like telling her the next step before the one she needed. 

This was what Eliza had to work with: her dumbass roommate and the next step in a plan that hadn’t even started yet. This could only go well.


End file.
